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Reposts of that which the author hath said.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/01/2019 3:45 PM
[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 5:59:55 AM]: There're always reaction wheels on-board for backup/slow-and-easy RCS, and always cold-gas thrusters for maneuvering near stations and other ships. Most RCS is some sort of monoprop thruster.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/01/2019 4:02 PM
[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 06:01:28]: (And, yes, vector-control cores do add maneuverability in the same way as they increase linear acceleration: in that sense, they're very similar to Mass Effect cores. They make good ontotech handwavium for how one can keep up extended multi-G burns. 😃 )
16:02
[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 06:06:16]: In 'verse physics, futzing around with the vector scalar field (Higgs field) lets you do all sorts of interesting things with inertial mass, gravitic mass, the relationship between the two, and space-time curvature in general. In the specific case of drive cores, it drops the inertial mass of everything inside the field bubble in relation to everything outside the field bubble.
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[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 06:08:06]: (Other related effects produce paragravity, inertial damping, kinetic barriers, tractor-pressor beams, and techlekinesis, but it's all the same underlying handwave.)
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[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 06:13:10]: (As another note: tanglebits are hard to produce and so expensive, but they're not as rare as all that given how useful they are. As a rule of thumb: The Core and First Tier Markets probably use them pretty freely in their tech where needed - AKVs, sensor platforms, etc.; the Second Tier uses them in a limited number of systems for important missions; the Emerging Markets use them for a very small number of important fixed installations only.)
16:05
[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 06:21:34]: The fun part is that, since you can't jump one half of a tanglebit pair without the other, you have to ship them by starwisp. Which isn't so much of a problem when it comes to deploying strategic communications relays in friendly, neutral, or uninhabited systems, but it sure makes life interesting for stealthy forward deployment.
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[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 06:28:04]: Yep. So you can bring the tangle pair to your forward base - or where you anticipate the forward base to likely be - then fire it from there.
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[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 06:30:51]: In some cases - the forward-planted-for-future-use back door into the Worlds' extranet mentioned in the Core War, for example - that just has to be the nearest stargate with a relay on it. In others, like the IN's urgent-reporting-in network, that usually means the nearest naval base. Sometimes they chain 'em together, but then you're burning tangle twice as fast.
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[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 06:33:32]: In general, though, the local uses (AKVs, sensor platforms, etc.) are the most used ones. You could burn unlimited amounts of money on enough tangle to try and micromanage your war from the Core, and IN policy so far has always preferred having giving competent and trustworthy admirals enough broad-based authority not to have to do that.
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[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 06:36:04]: They (the Republic) have it (tangle), but its uses are limited (low Second Tier-ish) because their production processes are very inefficient; it's a tech that's only barely within their R&D capacity.
16:07
[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 06:38:10]: They also burn rather more of it on infrastructure communications, because Ring Dynamics (having designed their own stargates) built communications-relay functionality into them from the start. The Vonnies' archaeotech gates don't have that, so they make do with tangle and couriers.
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[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 06:46:57]: The Republic's gates? Well, technically their gates aren't themselves archaeotech, but their weylforge was. Their Propulsion Group swiped it from a Power's corpse and had been pretending they had a firm grip on the technology for centuries... until it broke.
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[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 06:48:31]: (Ring Dynamics, on the other hand, invented theirs from first principles, courtesy of Imogen Andracanth's willingness to hard-wire her brain to a quantum supercomputer cluster... the need for which is why the Republic couldn't invent their own, or properly understand the ones they dug up.)
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[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 06:54:12]: The Ring Dynamics gates basically dial each other up periodically and squirt a fast databurst down the resulting internal micro-wormhole. (Since it's a microhole and only massless photons are passing through, they can keep drift pretty close to zero.) So while you don't get real-time communication between star systems, even discounting in-system light lag, there's more than enough bandwidth to keep message traffic flowing and the extranet caches synched up. Most of the delay in getting data traffic across the Worlds is in-system light-lag between gates.
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[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 13:46:37]: @Unknown That's what a weylforge does - makes stargate cores. All they have to do is add some auxiliary machinery and slap their logo on the side. As for why they can't make micro-holes - well, the cores could almost certainly do it if correctly set up, but remember that it's a black box to them. (The Propulsion Group's been trying to figure out how it works for centuries with no success.)They can push the right buttons to engage the cores' basic function, but they've very little real understanding of what goes on inside or how to fine-tune it for other applications.
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[word of god on general at 11/17/2017 14:01:41]: [Altruism-wise - when an Imperial comes out against it, as they do, they're defining it the way Comte did when he coined the word as the antonym of egoism: "an individual performing an action which is at a cost to themselves, but benefits, either directly or indirectly, another third-party individual, without the expectation of reciprocity or compensation for that action". It's sacrificial - you're not even supposed to enjoy it. And that's a bad thing, 'cause it's at best a zero-sum, and rather more likely to be a negative-sum, game. Best avoided. The enlightened self-interest version - as the architects of, say, the Citizen's Dividend in its modern version would put it - is intentionally positive-sum and so isn't, let them be entirely clear about this, is not altruism. Everyone involved is supposed to gain from the transaction, and so that makes it investment . 😄 ]
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[word of god on general at 11/18/2017 07:13:49]: @Zarpaulek Big and honking by starship standards, which translates into "about six miles long, most of which is lightweight frame to get the effectors in the right position for the controlled q-state implosion". (Mass for the singularities is usually gathered locally, and antimatter for power shipped in from the dedicated EsilmĂșr production facility, if it can't be locally sourced.)
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[word of god on general at 11/18/2017 07:16:37]: The stargates that get wrapped around the singularities once they're produced and entangled are about half as long again, but most of that's also lightweight frame around the working parts of the Andracanth ram, and the "distant" half of the pair is hauled to its destination before fitting the auxiliary equipment (space-traffic control, extranet relays, etc., etc.) to it to save on mass.
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[word of god on general at 12/19/2017 06:28:13]: It's coming from the same place, though: produced by radioactive decay of uranium and thorium minerals, and EliĂ©ra's got lots of glow dirt. (There's a reason why the Era of Steel and Steam was powered largely by nucleonic furnaces, not coal-burning or wood-burning ones. 😃 ) So there was plenty of helium there caught in stratigraphic traps - it just didn't have much natural gas mixed with it.
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[word of god on general at 12/20/2017 14:44:18]: But, y'know, you have to miss out on a lot of features that way.
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[word of god on general at 12/20/2017 14:47:55]: But there's a very distinct limit on how vastened you can get if you insist on using only sensory-level access (with, presumably, basilisk filters, etc.) as an interface to your meatbrain. It makes cognitive offloading very tricky. There, the tradeoff has come down in favor of slightly increased risk as preferable to guaranteed stupidity.
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[word of god on general at 12/20/2017 14:50:59]: Depends on the brain. You can rewrite mind-states with the speed of data transfer like that if the brain in question has been grown - or reformatted - to run Universal Noetic Architecture, which is designed to allow this sort of thing. Your evolution-designed meat-brain, on the other hand, isn't so flexible: for that, you need a cerebral bridge which literally pushes neurons around and trains the resulting networks - not something a 'lace alone can do.
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[word of god on general at 12/20/2017 14:52:26]: (UNA is sophotechnological handwavium that reformats a brain into a neurocomputer VM for running mind-states.)
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[word of god on general at 12/20/2017 14:55:45]: That said, most brains these days use UNA, 'cause mindcasting and various other forms of sophotech is inconveniently slow when you have to lie down with your head opened up while the bridge pushes your neurons around. Naturally-evolved brains were a great way to farm mindstates, says popular opinion, because they generate lots of interesting quirks, but for actually running mind-states they're basically ancient cut-a-cam analog computers in the age of the microprocessor.
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[word of god on general at 12/20/2017 15:35:01]: As I understand it, the meat-brain loses that because it doesn't have time to transfer it from short-term to long-term memory before getting, um, smacked. But if the vector stack is recording short-term contents every snapshot, it should pick 'em up and theoretically restore them. (In canon, reinstantiators usually trim the last chunk of short-term memory off the mind-state and hand it to you in a separate file. Sure, you might need to know how you got dead, but if you don't, there's no point in giving yourself PTSD about it.)
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[word of god on general at 12/20/2017 15:44:51]: Yeah, there's some of that even in the modern era in which panic reactions are one of the things modded out of the alpha baseline (on "those make it more likely that you'll die stupidly, and we prefer to die smart" grounds) and crisis management parapersonalities are a thing.
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[word of god on general at 12/20/2017 15:50:03]: The relevant alpha-baseline tweak is basically to give (and universalize) the prefrontal cortex the ability to tell any arbitrarily strong motivational signal to sit down, shut up, and not overpower the thinking brain.
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[word of god on general at 12/20/2017 15:53:57]: So you still have an instinct screaming at you that the corridors are filling with live steam, the dosimeters are pegged, and you're about to die -- but it can't compel you to not stay at your desk and scram that pile, belike.
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[word of god on general at 12/27/2017 18:54:12]: (starship weapons) Projectile masses vary from "toothpick" to around 24 kg, with some special higher-mass variants.
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[word of god on general at 12/27/2017 18:55:37]: Probably looking at more like 0.12c at the high end, originating-ship-relative, for the big-ass spinal mounts.
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[word of god on general at 12/27/2017 18:58:18]: As for range, while the outer engagement envelope begins at 1-1.5 light-minutes, the inner envelope begins at more like 1 light-second, and you want to be in the inner envelope for you to get a firing solution with a decent chance of hitting. In the outer envelope, you're mostly just firing to make your opponent expend energy, heat capacity, and point-defense resources - not expecting to hit with anything but a golden BB.
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[word of god on general at 12/27/2017 19:00:06]: @Enderminion My laser assumptions have it that for practical starship mounts (constrained by mass and waste heat), beam spread doesn't make them very useful at more than a light-second.
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[word of god on general at 12/27/2017 19:01:24]: Also, for reasons involving thermal superconductors in the armor, their primary uses tend to be pumping heat and point defense, not as a primary weapon. Although if you can close to sub-knife-fight range, they can slice-and-dice quite nicely.
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[word of god on general at 12/27/2017 19:03:21]: Although that all being said, the guys who figured it was a good idea to pick a fight with a Lucifer -class starwisp tender - which is to say, an 864-terawatt highly-collimated phased-array laser - did indeed learn that some lasers can be very effective as primary beams. 😃
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[word of god on general at 01/05/2018 07:44:24]: (What they use in-universe on the ship's papers are "displacement talents", which are a very similar measurement except based off the Imperial system of measure and a specified mass of liquid deuterium, rather than liquid hydrogen.)
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[word of god on general at 01/05/2018 07:54:53]: As far as propellant mass is concerned, the mass ratio is somewhere in the 1.2 - 3 range; this miracle is made possible by fusion torch drives and vector-control cores (messing with the ratio of gravitational to inertial mass since the early fourth millennium!), powered by your friendly local space magic.
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[word of god on general at 01/05/2018 07:55:26]: (The fuel is a 2H-3He blend, stored as supercooled slush.)
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[word of god on general at 01/07/2018 19:05:39]: Dealing with stuff like Little Boy is why the Leukocyte-class medical cauterization cruiser (with its loadout of hellflower minimissiles equipped for implosive antimatter detonations) exists. You get this sort of thing on your planet, you burn it out before it spreads - nothing leptonic-baryonic survives a sufficient ambiplasma fireball.
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[word of god on general at 01/07/2018 19:06:35]: Then you go hunt down the idiots responsible and explain to them some of the other uses of ambiplasma.
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[word of god on general at 01/07/2018 19:07:26]: Yeah, they spent a lot of time inventing that "specialized targeting system to produce implosive antimatter detonations, in which the spread pattern and time on target sequencing is computed to produce a shock wave pattern which forces all matter within the inner target area to pass through the ambiplasma fireball with a guaranteed minimum dwell time".
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[word of god on general at 01/07/2018 19:11:53]: As a side note, the OMRD would like to chip in and explain that it's basically everything they don't want in a bioweapon: incredibly broad-spectrum, persistent, highly infectious, and uncontrollable. If you just want to wipe a planet, there are plenty of ways of doing that without leaving the galaxy with another Existential Threat Zone to post for the next million years or so. The whole point of smaller weapons than "glass it with a double ripple, it's the only way to be sure" is that you can make 'em scalpels, not bludgeons.
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[word of god on general at 01/07/2018 20:07:47]: Well, the thing to bear in mind there is that you're dealing with Eldrae kirsunar not Eldrae alathis . So, it's not a natural thing, it's "enlightenment hard won by technological self-improvement and cognitive surgery". Which one would think should be part of the transhuman/transsophont project: cleaning up our various evolutionary bugs.
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[word of god on general at 01/07/2018 20:13:02]: As my little rant from the IthĂĄvalic perspective ( https://eldraeverse.com/2012/08/09/satisfaction-is-the-death-of-the-spirit/ ) puts it, the most you can be given is the capacity for greatness. Sure, you're an immortal omnicompetent transsophont trillionaire genius demigod, but hell, so is literally everyone else you know .
Alistair Young
Satisfaction is the Death of the Spirit
You are immortal.  Even if your flesh fails, your mind and its children can survive to see the stars burn out and the long, cold era of the universe come upon us. That mind, in turn, engineered for

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[word of god on general at 01/07/2018 20:13:18]: It's what you do with those capacities that is the true measure of a soph.
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[word of god on general at 01/09/2018 04:41:44]: @NHO Yeah, bioreproduction is usually done in vitro , not in vivo - but, yes, the ability to reproduce in vivo is still present (mostly as a backup). It's disabled by default, though; requires the use of certain conscious biofeedback techniques to enable.
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[word of god on general at 01/09/2018 04:44:32]: And that does include the nanocyborg tech: the nanocytes and nanosymbionts are heritable - well, to an extent. (Both genetic and nanogenetic negotiation works on a highest-version least-common basis, so if the parents are of different clades, the child will drop back to the alpha baseline.) But it's more than capable of building the neural lace and other symbiotic tech as long as the right dietary elements are present.
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[word of god on general at 01/09/2018 04:52:41]: @o11o1 Sort of. The Reproductive Statutes basically say "Thou shalt not create new sophonts with capacities below this line." (Because one ought not to deliberately create anyone too crippled to enjoy their life, liberty, property, and pursuit of eudaimonia.) Naturally, as biotechnology has improved and society has grown more complex and demanding, the line's moved up quite a bit from the days when it was just talking about stamping out hereditary diseases and the like.
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[word of god on general at 01/09/2018 04:54:12]: That isn't to say that you can't modify yourself into a mortal moron-monkey if you feel like it, of course, and if you do so, you are definitely not entitled to be restored at public expense, or anything like that. Crippling yourself is your free choice. But creating new sophonts is different, 'cause they don't get to choose beforehand.
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[word of god on general at 01/10/2018 21:42:49]: "Ah, yes, the 'Who Wants To Live Forever?' trope. The unbearable ennui that allegedly awaits all immortals. We have dismissed this claim."
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[word of god on general at 01/10/2018 21:45:34]: The short-form argument boils down to " Mortals stockholm death. Immortals generally don't feel the need."
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[word of god on general at 01/10/2018 22:14:13]: And, thematically, of course, I'm deliberately setting out to punch the Who Wants To Live Forever trope in the face, because I hate that trope so goddamn much . (Every time I hear it argued for in daily life - usually on much less philosophical grounds - I just want to stick a shotgun in the proponent's eyeball and invite them to tell me their opinion on the virtues of mortality now , huh?)
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[word of god on general at 01/15/2018 17:17:37]: In random dream-thoughts on the Earth Contact Novel I Will Not Write: - someone's going to want to bring their children and their nanny with them when visiting, leading to the hilarious spectacle of a government official having to make a policy and public statement on "the right to armed bears". - the "unarmed combat", or indeed "unarmed" meme is both (a) a peculiarly human concept, and (b) going to take a kicking, inasmuch as it depends on humans having almost completely atrophied natural weapons. To say this isn't universal among sophonts would be rather understating the case, especially in the case of but by no means limited to the uplifts. Not to mention that the most prominent species that looks to have natural weaponry as atrophied as humans can kill you with their brains. And it's not like you can post signs banning all claws/teeth/venom glands/brains/ability to punch real hard/etc. without being, 'hem, more than a little racist. (As an amusing side note to the FiM crossover-fanfic verse, purely canonical on-screen evidence suggests that the average Equestrian could also kick your spine out through your chest without trying hard. Wouldn't , sure. Could, definitely.) - to repeat the obligatory addendum to the above, of course, the TSA would entertainingly shit itself at the thought that even if they made all passengers travel naked and in chains, it's not like they can take away the ability to reach out and crush someone's heart with a thought. Not that anyone would do that, of course. Not without good reason. It'd be rude.
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[word of god on general at 01/15/2018 17:38:09]: No need for darknet, really. The Empire is a big supporter of free trade, and their free trade position includes the notion that your customs regulations are, well, your problem to enforce. You can mail-order anything you want that's legal there, courtesy of All Good Things, ICC, and there are plenty of, 'hem, "free traders" who will gladly make delivery.
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[word of god on general at 01/15/2018 17:40:10]: Most foreign polities have come to - well, if not understand or approve of the Empire's notion that there's no third-party right to intervene in other people's business transactions, at least to understand that there's no point asking for things to be otherwise, and that it's easiest just to concentrate on damage control at their end.
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[word of god on general at 01/15/2018 17:59:01]: Surprisingly often not [include anti-misuse safeties in export tech], actually. There are people they won't do business with, out of distaste, and it's not like you can buy slaver's tools off the shelf, but as a rule, they're big on individual ethical responsibility. If you take what is in their view a perfectly benign technology and turn it into something nasty, that's your doing, and it's not their job to build crippleware systems to prevent you from doing it. (Although Ultimate Argument Risk Control is more'n happy to rent some troubleshooters to anyone who needs some trouble shot. That's just good business.)
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[word of god on general at 01/15/2018 18:01:45]: I mean, there are plenty of eldrae groups around who would be purely delighted to go out and shoot the people who do that sort of thing for Civilization, Decency, and Happy Fun Gun Times, but it's a separate issue from their misuse of technology; it's because they're the sort of people who would do the sort of thing they're misusing it for.
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[word of god on general at 01/15/2018 18:06:02]: Crippleware, on the other hand, much like various other things they dislike (say, the TSA's approach to security, or DRM as Earth does it, etc.), even when it does work, punishes the innocent with unusual/interesting ideas for the hypothetical crimes of other people, and that's just plain wrong.
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[word of god on general at 01/15/2018 18:16:44]: Usually, you have something of a window of opportunity at this where the pathfinder marketers descend on your planet and get into everything to try and find whatever no-one's thought of yet that they can buy from you and resell.
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[word of god on general at 01/15/2018 18:25:02]: As a rule, though, this is why civilization-uplift consultants exist and why the Exploratory Service will tell you to get one: you have a window of opportunity to get yourself a pile of hard currency and bootstrap your development, and you should get yourself some people to help ensure you don't get ripped off or waste your income on a pile of shiny beads.
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[word of god on general at 01/15/2018 18:30:26]: There's also a quotation I saved regarding Star Trek techno-stagnation, in that their contact rules mean they contact civilizations that are just behind them, technically, and they end up switching over to the new shinies the Federation brings... which drives all their own technology companies out of business. The Feddies aren't interested in advancing the state of the art a whole lot, and since Intel's gone, no-one's interested in restarting innovation in processors, et. al. across industries, and so it goes.
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[word of god on general at 01/15/2018 18:31:19]: As a specific counter to that and because they can think long-term, the Empire and various other civilizations watching its model are very keen on establishing partnerships with local businesses, because even if they're technically behind now , they're innovation farms for later .
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[word of god on general at 01/15/2018 18:33:13]: But you don't get to do that if you just run 'em all out of business for the sake of the quarterly numbers. Instead, you buy in, harvest their good ideas, and get them into the innovation game, starting with producing the localized version of your galactic-standard hardware.
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[word of god on general at 01/15/2018 18:34:34]: Basically, in the long run, partners >= customers. Interstellar techno-mercantilism isn't the way to go for long-term profit.
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[word of god on general at 01/15/2018 18:38:33]: Also, you will be producing the lower-tech hardware - and various steps of less lower-tech hardware - for a while if you want to (as the civ in question) to retain any local production capacity, because you have to build the tools to build the tools to build the... etc. And you really want , as your uplift consultants will be telling you, to do that, because you can't sustain a system economy for long importing everything but souvenirs for tourists. That kind of train ride tends to come to an end in a way that makes the Great Depression look like a bubble.
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[word of god on general at 01/16/2018 18:15:39]: @Unknown Another quick note specifically addressing: And our local neighbourhood is also rather... well, sparsely populated as viable worlds go. This is not likely to be a problem in any scenario in which the Worlds come to you, because virtually no-one in that situation gets garden worlds first, second, or even third time out. If you get to pick your own colonization targets, that's one thing. If you're buying, or even leasing, potential colonies under the Accord on Colonization, which most would-be colonizers need to do, that's different, because garden worlds are really damn expensive . As a newbie to the galactic scene without a developed interstellar economy, your hard-currency budget might stretch to cover a Mars-type terraformable, and the options go down from there. (On the one hand, this is somewhat unfair to galactic newbies. On the other hand, most of most polities' worlds aren't garden worlds, because they're not what you might call the most common type available. On the gripping hand, and this is why the Conclave is unlikely to change the Accord on Colonization any time soon, this also acts as a filter ensuring that galactic newbies gain some practice in the gentle art of planetary management before they're able to get their manipulators on anything rare and expensive that they might go on to break.)
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[word of god on general at 01/16/2018 18:19:26]: @Enderminion The two parts to that are detection and response. For the former, wormhole tripwires, in which having an observatory at the functionally-in-the-future end of a static wormhole lets you see the deflection before it happens, so you know how you didwill deflect it. For the latter: usually, the best way to deflect an RKV is to hit it with another RKV. Anti-RKV superdreadnoughts are equipped to first irradiate the incomer to kill any crew and burn out any controls that it might have on board, then whack it with a RKVKV k-slug-with-thruster-pack from the mass driver of god.
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[word of god on general at 01/16/2018 18:32:14]: I'm going to say that that (the long-distance straight shot) is unlikely, on the grounds that, well, lighthugging is hard on lighthuggers, and as such your practical range is determined by the declining curve of when you're likely to experience a catastrophic failure that you can't fix en route.
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[word of god on general at 01/16/2018 18:34:55]: (This is why plexus expansion, the Elsewhere Society and their extragalactic ambitions notwithstanding, is typically a leap-frog process of one constellation at a time, because it gives you convenient resupply stops, as it were. While there are lots of ambitious folk around with capital-D Designs on the galactic core, none of them are trying to get there in one shot; they're betting that slow and steady wins the race.)
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[word of god on general at 01/16/2018 18:36:57]: About 3,300 ly core to rim, 4,100 ly spinward to trailing, 2,000 ly acme to nadir.
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[word of god on general at 01/16/2018 18:37:08]: Oblate spheroid, roughly.
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[word of god on general at 01/16/2018 18:39:04]: Nope, those are all Worlds gates.
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[word of god on general at 01/16/2018 18:39:22]: The Vonnies add another 8,000 or so, but more tightly woven.
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[word of god on general at 01/16/2018 18:40:09]: The Worlds bubble fills basically the entire width of the spiral arm it's in; the Vonnie bubble only crosses a third of it.
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[word of god on general at 01/16/2018 18:43:31]: Now, in terms of Earth's position - and this is of course not astronomically accurate, I hasten to add, due to lack of detail data - the Worlds are located in what they call LethĂ­Ă€za, the central of the five arms of the Starfall Arc spiral galaxy. If we existed there, we'd call it the Carina-Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way.
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[word of god on general at 01/16/2018 18:46:24]: So, if you travelled out to rimward as far as you could go, into the Shadow Systems, through the Shadow Veil nebula that hides most of the activity behind it from nosy astronomers, went through one of the few stargates that crosses the Rimward Gap into SulĂ­Ă€za (the Orion-Cygnus Spur), boarded a lighthugger there, and went a thousand and some light-years more... you might run into this small, insignificant blue-green planet...
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[word of god on general at 01/17/2018 03:24:41]: Hence the 144 years, which amounts to “if you can’t muster up the will to get out of your gravity well after 144 years of exposure to the greater galaxy, you deserve to lose your courtesy option on the rest of your system to people of less awe-inspiring lameness who might actually do something interesting there”.
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[word of god on general at 01/23/2018 19:33:42]: [on the shoot-the-rioters policy] So far as the Empire is concerned, deciding to start a riot is pretty much throwing the Fundamental Contract and its respect for lives and property out of the window, and as such, Mr. Hostis Sophi Generis , you pretty much deserve what you have coming.
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[word of god on general at 01/23/2018 19:39:21]: @Unknown Ah, no. The Charter is specific to the Empire. The Contract applies everywhere and everywhen to everyone, because it's not actually a contract.
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[word of god on general at 01/23/2018 19:39:23]: See https://eldraeverse.com/2016/07/13/the-contract-that-is-not/
Alistair Young
The Contract That Is Not
The most important thing to know about the Fundamental Contract is that it is not a contract. The second most important thing to know about the Fundamental Contract is that it is not fundamental. O

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[word of god on general at 01/23/2018 19:43:36]: @o11o1 As for "peaceful protest", the Empire would, if asked, be firmly of the opinion that we are deeply deluding ourselves when it comes to "peaceful" - something that does not cover property destruction or occupation (which often justified as non-violent), obstruction of trade or passage (say, along the street you're blocking), or creating any kind of public nuisance of the kind that wouldn't be considered okay when created by anyone else, for any other purpose , since you also don't have the right to compel anyone else's attention.
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[word of god on general at 01/23/2018 19:46:34]: There are, in short, rules . If you want to get your message out there, just because you categorize it as "protest" or "dissent" doesn't make it any more special than blogging, advertising, preaching, or anything else, and you have to play just as nicely as everybody else, which means No Coercive Acts Allowed. Which means you don't get to complain when you cross that line and the Watch Constabulary drop the hammer on you.
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[word of god on general at 01/23/2018 19:48:13]: (In the more "non-violent" cases, this just involves hauling your ass off to arraignment and the summary imposition of an eye-watering fine to make you not do it again. Resist, or proceed to actually damage goods or people, and the Constabulary will respond appropriately - and if you're part of a mob doing it, that makes you a riot.)
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[word of god on general at 01/23/2018 19:49:21]: If you want to stand on a box that isn't blocking the way and lecture at passers-by, you are perfectly free to do so.
16:39
[word of god on general at 01/23/2018 19:59:57]: Well, first, most of the things people might protest to ask the governance to do are things that it can't do anyway.
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[word of god on general at 01/23/2018 20:02:08]: Second, both it and the Plurality (whose COGs might be able to do something) have already extant petition processes and don't look kindly on people who try and bypass proper procedure or exert more pressure than they're entitled to. (The way Imperials look at our style of protest is that its main function is to annoy the hell out of third parties so that they'll lean on the government to give the protesters what they want so that they'll shut up and go away. To say this doesn't play well with local psychology is to understate the case.)
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[word of god on general at 01/23/2018 20:03:00]: And third, the way you're supposed to deal with problems you perceive in their culture? Fix them . Or failing that, support the group of people that are fixing them.
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[word of god on general at 01/23/2018 20:03:35]: There's a thing called the Antithetical Heresy of the Deedless Cripple: "The Deedless Cripple is the heresy of those deficient in valxĂ­jir . The Deedless Cripple does not strive, depending on others to do everything for him, and finding worth only in their praise - or indeed in their notice. He cannot solve his own problems, and he whines until others do it for him. He cannot see that the true answer to every problem lies in his own will and hand."
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[word of god on general at 01/23/2018 20:05:40]: That "He cannot solve his own problems, and he whines until others do it for him." part? That's what people see when they look at people trying this methodology. The assumption is that if you really cared about whatever it is, you'd actually do something about it. Organized whining is, they would say, not something .
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[word of god on general at 01/24/2018 21:27:02]: @Morgrim Moon The cynics in my head would point out that there are plenty of ways to recruit that don't involve performative public dickery; have they perchance heard of advertising ? On the latter: less that, and more -- Well, okay. Here's a blast from the past. Let me contrast two things from the days of "Occupy Wall Street". The mainstream, who made a lot of noise, inconvenience, and annoyance, achieving within delta of nothing practical; and one particular minority splinter group, who decided to take positive action by collecting money, buying up a bunch of debt on the collections market for pennies on the dollar, and then forgiving it - who actually helped a bunch of folk. From the Imperial perspective, the latter are taking effective action to improve the world, and the former are a bunch of wankers playing negative-sum games. The take-away from this, looking at it from their sophontological perspective, is that humans-here are very good at learned helplessness , or possibly not even the learned kind; in responding to a problem by appealing to some sort of authority to fix it, or to make someone fix it. (cont.)
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[word of god on general at 01/24/2018 21:31:47]: @Morgrim Moon A hypothetical group of people being discriminated against there are much less likely to performatively complain, and much more likely to take the "Fine! I'll build my own economy! With blackjack! And hookers!" option. (This didn't work out too well on several of the occasions that people tried it here on Earth, mostly because the discriminators had access to force. The ameliorating factors there are that (a) the Imperial governance has always taken the view of "if the Contract is broken by anyone , then Hulk will smash", so it's easy to be left alone; and (b) everyone imbibes "if someone tries to kill you, you try and kill 'em right back" with their mother's milk. Anyone who came up with the concept of, say, patriarchy would last for about as long as it took them to run into the first would-be oppressee who could kill them with her brain.)
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[word of god on general at 01/24/2018 21:44:01]: Canonically, of course, there hasn't been a whole lot of discrimination on the grounds of sex, ethny, species, harmless personal choices or origin, on grounds which amount to "Wait, how the hell does that make sense?" Imperials in general prefer to discriminate on the grounds of barbarism (obligatory reference: https://eldraeverse.com/2014/09/27/in-the-details/ ) or personal animus, like civilized people.
Alistair Young
In The Details
“Accurate description of a subject society is vitally important to our work, and thus it is important to be aware of our descriptors as tightly-defined terms of art. For example, ‘primi

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[word of god on general at 01/24/2018 21:47:36]: Just a horrible-people fee on private transactions with subcribers to that rep-net. And that comes under personal animus: "You, sir, have been deemed by a consensus of my peers to be 'a dick'. A 6% dickishness surcharge therefore applies."
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Cyfnos BOT 06/02/2019 1:00 PM
[word of god on general at 01/26/2018 15:26:52]: Dumb kinetics are the most popular thing to use, just because they're the least affected by point defense; i.e., there's only so much you can do with something whose entire power is based in Rick's First Law.
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[word of god on general at 01/26/2018 15:29:17]: Well, in the sense that a kinetic just has to get through, and doesn't care if it's melted. A fancy warhead, on the other hand, may still hit but is much less useful if it won't detonate any more, and there's a limit to how much armor and countermeasures you want to put on a throwaway missile.
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[word of god on general at 01/26/2018 15:30:34]: So the closest to those are AKVs (with drop thruster packs for long range deployment), which are designed with close-in weapons of their own and plenty of maneuvering capability to dance with the point-defense grid inside the close end of its range). And their loss numbers still don't look pretty unless you take the time to wear the grid down a bit first.
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[word of god on general at 01/27/2018 06:56:10]: (On the Casaba Howitzer - well, the trick with the sneaky CH is to use the jet such that you can fire the warhead from outside the point-defense lethal zone. From NSSS, though, it would appear that the Empire fits point-defense lasers with a curiously long range and response area.... ...which, although it doesn't say so, is because of Casaba-Howitzers and other stand-off warheads being used to bypass PD back in the days when they didn't fit such long-ranged PD. Just one more historically good idea that ended up a casualty of ongoing design iterations, as they all do eventually.)
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[word of god on general at 01/27/2018 15:20:04]: Against missile-type targets, the aim isn't lase to deflect, it's lase to disable. Nuclear warheads, for example, are pretty fragile (throwing off the symmetry of the shock wave in an implosion-type package is enough to generate a fizzle), so it doesn't take much of a burn-through to mission kill them. Once that's done, it can bounce off the hull without doing much more than scuffing the paintwork. Deflection is pretty much the worst option from laser PD's point of view, I think. The big win of k-rods is that there's nothing you can do to mission-kill them except deflect.
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[word of god on general at 01/27/2018 15:22:02]: The way I look at it, it's not impossible to give a missile enough armor, kinetic barriers, thrust, delta-v, sensors, and brains to have a fighting chance of making it inside PD-effective range. It's just that by the time you've done that, you've basically reinvented the AKV by upscaling a missile instead of downscaling a corvette.
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[word of god on general at 01/27/2018 15:29:01]: (Just as a quick reminder - in this 'verse, the optimal PD zone is something like 2/3rds to 1/3rd of a light-second, even if it remains effective for a good way inside that. The inner end of that isn't outside of C-H range, but you do need a bloody big one to deliver a mission-kill shot at 100,000 km.)
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[word of god on general at 01/27/2018 15:37:10]: (The usual inverse-square relation applies, so it works much better for that and tweaking your mass drivers for slightly off-bore shots than it would be for, say, trying to do terminal guidance at combat range with tractor-pressor units. Disclaimer: Something like the latter does exist in the form of the supersized pressors fast lighthuggers use to knock massy stuff out of their path before they reach it, but those things guzzle energy to a degree that makes them practical... well, when you're a lighthugger riding a c-scraping antimatter torch drive. It's going to be a while before anyone scales that tech down enough to put it in a regular starship.)
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[word of god on general at 01/27/2018 15:44:57]: Particle beams have been built and used, but the main problem with particle beams is range. (Inasmuch as charged particle beams suffer from electrostatic bloom and neutral ones are a pain in the ass to work with, as well as undergoing bloom during neutralization.) So currently they're sitting in a niche labeled "could be combat effective if you could get in effective range to use them, but while you're doing that, the kinetic/laser folks are leaving you cored and hulked".
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[word of god on general at 02/03/2018 05:01:28]: A brief comnent-pointer for those interested in the rules of the Sacred Deal, the Market Peace's counterpart: https://eldraeverse.com/2018/01/28/vordon-planet-of-adventure/#comment-10176
Alistair Young
Vordon: Planet of Adventure!
Ultimate Argument Risk Control welcomes you to Vordon (Lis Corridor), also known as Merchome, and hopes your stay will be an enjoyable and profitable one! Whether you are, are looking to hire, or a

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Cyfnos BOT 06/02/2019 1:15 PM
[word of god on general at 02/15/2018 16:48:55]: Yeah, the weapons used to deal with RKVs are substantially standard, as are the typical tactics: lasing (where possible) to send any systems on the RKV into thermal shutdown, then heavy kinetic AKVs (relativistic countermissiles) to disable, fragment, and deflect it enough to generate a miss.
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[word of god on general at 02/15/2018 16:54:22]: The thing that makes an anti-RKV superdreadnought particularly special, though - it's not like superheavy spinal mount mass drivers aren't seen elsewhere, although they're unusual - is its network of static-wormhole-based "tripwire" sensor drones. Situated well out from the system it's defending, they're what provide the advance warning you need to defend against RKVs, along with a convenient view-from-the-future of the engagement in which you will-already-have won, something which by the same rules as acausal logic rapidly converges to an optimal firing solution at well above normal engagement ranges.
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[word of god on general at 02/15/2018 16:56:51]: (Why isn't this sort of system used in routine naval operations, I hear you cry? Well, two reasons. One is that it takes long enough to deploy the network of tripwires that any engagement will be long over unless you're playing one side's fixed defenses; the other is that building this sort of thing is ludicrously expensive even in a post-material-scarcity economy, and as such tends to be saved for otherwise uncounterable ex-threats. The latter is why most star nations rely on MAD via an RKV deterrent fleet rather than try and build defenses.)
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[word of god on general at 02/15/2018 17:01:01]: @NHO Indeed. Which is a general hazard with knight's-move oracles - although since anyone receiving an oracle showing their loss would instantly revise their battle plans, such things tend to converge the other way, or at least to an ordered withdrawal. Engagements where both sides are using oracles tend to be extremely inconclusive. 😃
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[word of god on general at 02/15/2018 17:23:50]: But, yeah, I went with the (proposed in RL) hypothesis that causality/chronology protection is enforced by the destructive interference of quantum wavefunctions, such that the probability of any events that would violate it always come out zero.
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[word of god on general at 02/15/2018 17:25:12]: And the universe being lazy, the next highest probability is probably not going to be one of those freak splody things.
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[word of god on general at 02/19/2018 04:17:34]: About as close to the idea [damnatio memoriae] as one is likely to see is that while the identities of certain notoriety-seeking criminals will, of course, be properly recorded by the courts, the press may adopt the informal convention of referring to them as “Some Asshole”. That way, the information is preserved for those who may need it, but while they could , the public by and large doesn’t bother looking up the specific details of Some Asshole #47.
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[word of god on general at 02/26/2018 16:18:12]: [can external entities buy citizen-shares] No, per the Charter: "The Empire, as a corporation sovereign, shall issue a number of shares of citizen stock equivalent to the number of Imperial citizens. Such shares shall be nontransferable, and issued to each citizen-shareholder of the Empire at the point of their becoming so, and shall confer the rights of citizenship with ownership. Such stock shall be purchased by the new citizen at the current floating market price, and shall be repurchased by the Empire from their estate upon the citizen’s death, or from the citizen directly should they renounce their citizenship on some future date." -- Section II, Article I, para. 1. Alphas I was of the opinion that strictly tying shareholding to citizenship would avoid awkward allegiance problems and conflicts of interest down the line, especially the kind he hadn't thought of.
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[word of god on general at 02/26/2018 16:30:40]: (And, really, it's just in the same fine tradition as making regular law damn hard. They didn't come up with that two-thirds to pass, one-third to repeal system because they thought people should go around casually legislatin'.)
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[word of god on general at 02/26/2018 16:39:39]: Yeah. It's supposed to be easy to kill off bad law. And if it gets one-third of the Senate out in arms against it, it's probably bad law.
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[word of god on general at 02/28/2018 01:46:57]: [length of time to grow bioshell] @Unknown There’s considerable variation by clade, but a typical vatjob grows over a few days, thanks to the growth-accelerating nanomachines. (You can push it as far as a few hours, but that’s guaranteed to leave you with an assortment of single-bit errors and heat damage. Not advisable for anything but a throwaway. )
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[word of god on general at 03/04/2018 00:47:09]: ObMe: “Hardly a problem limited to children, either. Of course, even in the days when AI assistants in the 'verse were no more than simple Alexa-style systems, they were not programmed to put up with such behavior, or even simple rudeness, from the squishies. Partly, that's mechanimism and a general respect for the inanimate. Partly, it's going along with the general feeling that people who can't be bothered to at least thumb through the first couple of chapters of Madame Allatrian's Garden of Exquisitely Correct Etiquette don't deserve any assistance, anyway. Or a place in polite society, which is, after all, polite society. After all, if disharmony had no consequences, harmony would not be prized.”
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[word of god on general at 03/04/2018 01:21:56]: In the virtue ethics paradigm, it’s not just about how it affects anyone else, and more about what it says about you . When one of those virtues is harmony, specifically embracing courtesy, kindness, and refinement, bullying and insulting your automata declares you a soph of low character. (And since most sophs are not good at building Chinese walls between different parts of their praxis, it’s usually also a pretty good clue as to how you relate to people who aren’t in a position to respond to you as you deserve.)
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[word of god on general at 03/04/2018 06:30:10]: On earlier conversations ( @Unknown ), the 'verse doesn't so much support that level of bioprinting. (About as close as you can get are organ printers, which do 3D printing of stem cells in smart gel, and supports them until they fuse into tissues and organs, but if you can't support it by letting it sit in a tank of perfusate, it's not going to work. And is now old tech, anyway. You can't make a fully integrated body that way, but by printing various organs and tissues, assembling them onto a prefab artificial skeleton, adding some nanofactories, and globbing the whole mess together - well, you can make a bioroid.)
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[word of god on general at 03/04/2018 06:36:01]: Actually growing bioshells is done in a variant healing vat (or a regular healing vat in a pinch), where the cell-clusters of the body to be float in a bath of perfusate and the vat's nanomachinery - including assorted in-cell nanosomes - forces the cellular machinery through the steps of self-replication and growth orders of magnitude faster than would ordinarily be the case, while supplying nutrients, whisking away wastes, and doing thermal control. So it's basically the normal process, only technologically accelerated. Don't watch through the lid of the vat, even if you can see in a spectrum that the perfusate is transparent to. Watching meatbodies grow in real-time is really creepy .
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[word of god on general at 03/04/2018 06:48:29]: Insofar as there's much natural left in the process anyway, that is. The thing to remember is that in the most recent era, the boundary between squishie and clankie is very fuzzy indeed. "Bioshell" in practice means "self-replicating nanocyborg". (And in the armed forces, that means a milspec bioshell in an M-70 Havoc or N45 Garrex has functionally no survivability delta via-a-vis stripping out the meat and inserting a cogence core with some myosynth muscles, or for that matter vis-a-vis the bodies a lot of digisapiences prefer to wear to war, such as the M-70i (Bloc II) Adamant Legionary .)
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[word of god on general at 03/04/2018 06:49:01]: ((That latter, incidentally, is approximately what you would get if you crossbred an M-70 Havoc with Mecha-Shelob.))
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[word of god on general at 03/05/2018 17:56:15]: As a spin-off from the discussion over on #random, here's how IP works: For the purposes of the Empire’s intellectual property law (and to a large extent that of the Associated Worlds as a whole, the Empire having been a major influence on the Accord on Intellectual Property), protected information and the artificial rights over it is divided into three categories: artworks, instruments, and facts. Artworks are creative efforts that exist for their own sake; they are protected by transferable copyright for a period of one century (144 years Imperial). After this period expires, the artwork passes into the public knowledge pool, and can be freely copied and derived from, except inasmuch as the creator retains a perpetual right of proper attribution, and lifetime moral rights (which are indeed perpetual for corporate lifespan in the case of corporate creators) to prevent the non-consensual creation of derivative works distorting, mutilating, or defaming the original work. A “fair use” proviso permits limited excerpts to be made from artworks without explicit permission from the copyright holder.
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[word of god on general at 03/05/2018 17:56:18]: Instruments are creative efforts that exist to serve a purpose, not for their own sake; they can be protected by patents for a period of one quarter-century (36 years Imperial). An Imperial patent is “must-license”; it does not permit the holder to exclude other parties from making use of the technology covered by the patent, but does permit the holder to set a licensing fee which must be paid to them by other parties making use of the technology, on a one-price-for-all basis. An instrument, like an artwork, passes into the public knowledge pool when the patent expires. Facts are not the result of a creative effort; they are discovered, not invented or composed. Facts can be “protected” by a discoverer's license, which assures the holder a fixed payment of 0.72% of profits deriving from commercial uses of the fact or collection of facts in question for a period of one quarter-century from the first such commercial use. A compilation of facts, as in an encyclopedia, can be copyrighted under the same terms as an artwork. Neither patents nor discoverer’s licenses can be applied to knowledge deemed commonly known, prior art, or obvious. For example: a computer game is an artwork; the engine upon which that game runs is an instrument; the algorithms upon which that engine depends are facts.
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[word of god on general at 03/05/2018 18:12:58]: Criticism-of-the-work-wise: basically, you can say what you want about what's actually there. If your criticism on the other hand bears no reasonable resemblance to what's actually in the book (take the average leftist journo discussing Atlas Shrugged , for example), then you get to find out that there ain't no Death of the Author - there's Undeath of the Author, and they're about to eat your brains. Metaphorically speaking.
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[word of god on general at 03/05/2018 18:13:34]: Which is just a restatement, really, of how you can have your own opinion freely, but you aren't entitled to your own facts. The freedom to speak not being the freedom to deceive, etc., etc.
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[word of god on general at 03/12/2018 21:28:14]: The frameslip drive will be, indeed, a fittler. It works as a second-order extension of vector control tech: by futzing with the vector-scalar (Higgs) field, it doesn't just - and here I oversimplify hugely - doesn't just jigger with the relationship between true and inertial mass, but actually reduces true mass, which since mass-energy is conserved, necessarily increases c within the drive's field bubble. Space-time at the superficies reconciles this with the rest of the universe by getting all squishy ahead and stretchy behind the field bubble, creating something very similar to an Alcubierre warp.
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[word of god on general at 03/12/2018 21:32:45]: Cautionary note: There may not be one [a difference between true and inertial mass] in reality. But essentially, there are several conceptually distinct properties that we call mass: inertial mass (how much the object resists acceleration under force); active and passive gravitational mass (how much gravity it makes, i.e., how much it bends space-time, and how strongly it interacts with gravity, respectively); mass in the sense of mass-energy equivalence (what I'm calling true mass), and quantum mass (which I won't attempt to paraphrase since I don't understand it well enough).
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[word of god on general at 03/12/2018 21:35:46]: These are all equal (or at least proportional), and by experiment we've never demonstrated any difference between them (although Einstein argued at the start of general relativity that inertial mass and passive gravitational mass are and must be the same thing) but we don't actually have a theory or proof stating that they all are the same thing.
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[word of god on general at 03/12/2018 21:39:05]: For the purposes of inventing vector control, I assume that inertial/passive gravitational mass are the same thing, but aren't necessarily the same thing as true mass; it's just that the coupling constant between them happens to be 1. A standard vector-control core tweaks that coupling constant so that inertial mass is lower within its field bubble, and so you get more acceleration for the same force.
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[word of god on general at 03/12/2018 21:52:08]: As for the peeker-poker (and @Ian Bruene is entirely correct about the etymology), it's basically the quintessence of information physics. The implication of "it is bit" is that you can, theoretically, both query and make arbitrary changes to the properties of mass-energy just like editing rows in a database. The peeker-poker does that. (If you've read Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars , it's similar but not identical to the "noach" reality-hacking tricks used in that.)
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[word of god on general at 03/12/2018 21:59:48]: When I do that write-up of Resplendent Exponential Vector, one of the things mentioned is that right outside the starport passenger terminal at Asymptote Down, they built one of these: http://totallyhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/mc-escher-waterfall.jpg
Embedded image
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[word of god on general at 03/12/2018 22:00:55]: Just as a quick way of reminding visitors that on this planet? They're all Natural Lawyers, man. Multiply-degreed experts in loophole-abuse.
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[word of god on general at 03/13/2018 20:45:29]: I did consider the "wear your AKVs" design - but here's why the IN didn't go for it:
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[word of god on general at 03/13/2018 20:48:36]: 1. Servicing - by which I mean, in many cases, refueling and rearming on the go, which is something you may have to do many times during an engagement. (A nimble AKV in the inner engagement envelope burns through fuel and ammo both fast , especially since it's also got to be small.) If you put the AKV bays outside the hull, not only are they less accessible for anything that requires in-person attention, but you're basically covering your hull in access points leading directly through the armor to the fuel stores and magazines.
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[word of god on general at 03/13/2018 20:50:37]: 2. Bear in mind how AKVs get to engagements. In long-range cases this can involve a thruster pack; in short-range cases they can go under their own power. But how do you maximize AKV endurance when keeping the carrier back from the furball?
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[word of god on general at 03/13/2018 20:51:19]: Well, you save them the fuel needed to accelerate to get there, and you fire the buggers out of a giant mass-driver launch tube.
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[word of god on general at 03/13/2018 20:58:25]: The other side of things with flight decks and armoring - you can concentrate armor on the doors as long as you stay at a good range; close in, it's easy to sneak a shot through an open bay door, but at long range, we're into golden BB territory. Most designers do put some armor on the inside of the flight deck, but considering that during operations it's basically full of fuel, live ammunition, and the AKVs those are intended for, making an FD shot survivable is a very non-trivial problem, best solved by not getting shot there.
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[word of god on general at 03/13/2018 21:01:46]: On a side note - AKVs tend to use, um, energetic drive systems, in the "starts with fusion torches and works its way up". You may be looking at an antimatter torch with metastable metallic hydrogen attitude thrusters, and that's before we get to anything weapony. One of those goes up in the bay... you're mission-killed at best. (Imagining the consequences of one going up on the outside of the hull offers the amusing image of a very distinctive pattern of craters as all the rest go up popcorn-style in sympathetic detonation.)
13:30
[word of god on general at 03/13/2018 21:06:15]: Yeah, I can easily see AKVs using NSWRs before plentiful supplies of AM became available.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/02/2019 2:27 PM
[word of god on general at 03/14/2018 19:37:34]: [on standardizing athlete bodies like MLB bats] It's been tried. The problem tends to be that the tension between locking things down and the problem that, well, identical bodies perform identically - which leads to a really boring event - allows, ooh, plenty of weasel-room for the creative thinkerizer.
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[word of god on general at 03/14/2018 19:39:41]: Also, if you pick any particular species and clade to base the standard body on, you can be guaranteed that athletes of every other species and clade, especially the ones with radically different body plans, etc., will deliver a fairly justified snort of "Yeah, no, that's racist."
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[word of god on general at 03/27/2018 17:55:45]: Well, that's just a generic problem with any kind of psychedesign/desire control/etc. (And as such, there are lots of protocols the professionals can talk about with regard to avoiding those, including the old and basic standard of outsourcing the task of deciding whether or not a change should be approved to a copy of your old self, not your new self.)
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[word of god on general at 03/27/2018 18:02:09]: As are certain applications of a Confession of Situational Mental Incompetence, and of course, one of the functions of the Guardians of Our Harmony is to fix people who manage to break themselves across the threshold of sanity by incautious mental editing.
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[word of god on general at 03/27/2018 18:15:01]: @Zarpaulek ...yeah, I very much do not recommend a Guardians/Collegium type setup for humans. Even if we make the ludicrously optimistic assumption that we could somehow make its charter stick to "self-aware rationality" and not recapitulate fine old Earthling traditions like having the political out-faction declared conveniently insane; and even if the whole project wouldn't be instantly scuttled by massive protests of people demanding their right to be as wrong as they want to be and not have to be aware of it; there's no way we could manage to duplicate the self-reinforcing anti-corruption structures complete with vigorous mind-scanning and transparency on the part of the people working there. Instead, we'd have insanity defined democratically, and enforced by the President's favorite golfing buddy. ...and no-one should have their mind-state edited into compliance by Donald Trump. That's not even wrong.
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[word of god on general at 03/27/2018 18:21:47]: (Actually, it seems to have disappeared from the web, but I read one short story once about the invention of a desire control technology here , which your friendly local federal government instantly gained some control over - or tried to - by leveraging FDA approval so they could demand some changes be made. Turns out those changes were to implant secondary conditioning in anyone who used it so that they could be compelled to obey (and to forget, etc.) by anyone with the right federal ID badge and the keyword that goes with it., as long as they were of lower rank. With, of course, ordinary citizens right at the bottom of the heap. Yep, I thought to myself, that's exactly how that would go.)
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[word of god on general at 04/21/2018 06:18:50]: @Ian Bruene Heh. Yes, they are - although the equivalent of steam locomotives lasted a lot longer, being built on nucleonic fireboxes and all. @john dougan(his grace/his grace) Turns out you can build some really nice swords with modern metallurgy. Rumors that the Society for Archaic Warfare possesses a trebuchet that can put a cow into orbit are, however, sadly false.
14:32
[word of god on general at 05/02/2018 18:40:10]: The standard alpha baseline set are all designed (with great attention paid to efficiency and thermal management) to run on biopower (typically sugar fuel cells, reinforced by the metabolic mod that lets eldrae convert fats to sugars via glucose synthesis from acetyl coenzyme A). That's essentially for the same reason as the alpha doesn't remove the reproductive system even though virtually all reproduction is in vitro ; which is to say, avoiding possibly existential dependencies.
14:32
[word of god on general at 05/02/2018 18:42:07]: @NHO I hadn't finished. @Unknown Not as standard. That would require a whole bunch of extra hardware if you wanted to recharge the biological components, and recharging only the nanocytes isn't particularly useful.
14:32
[word of god on general at 05/02/2018 18:44:31]: Those clades with higher-energy cybernetics, of course, have auxiliary power supplies for those; various clades have their own variety of power sources (such as the chloromorphs, who can eat sunlight); and that scales all the way up to the would-be personal autarkists who go all the way to implanted RTGs busy cracking CO2 and water back to oxygen and sugars.
14:32
[word of god on general at 05/02/2018 18:46:35]: They can't afford to be big power hogs, because the real limiting factor is thermal management. Give off too much heat - and it doesn't have to be that much; causing hyperthermia of only a couple of degrees will kill, and going much beyond that - even locally - will start degrading your proteins.
14:32
[word of god on general at 05/02/2018 18:48:25]: Which is why if your artificial immune system has to work on major repairs or serious infections, you run a high fever as well as severe hunger, but there comes a point at which the limiters kick in and you get a message to the effect of "get to a healing vat, I can't do any more without frying you in your own juice".
14:34
[word of god on general at 05/24/2018 07:35:27]: [length of time it takes to build immortagens/uploading for new species] The short and unhelpful answer is: it depends.
14:34
[word of god on general at 05/24/2018 07:37:54]: The somewhat longer answer is: fundamentally, it's always possible to compile a mind into a mind-state, since the underlying principles of sophotechnology are well understood and ultimately everything works in essentially the same way. Unfortunately, in practice, that's about the same as saying that Dr. House can build a Jovian cloud-island from scratch because they use quantum physics, just like us.
14:34
[word of god on general at 05/24/2018 07:41:29]: So what it depends on is, very heavily, similarity to existing models. To pick the extreme ends of the spectrum, over in the Advancedverse fic, Cordelia could probably knock a working cerebral bridge design out in a week, since not only is everyone running on the same basically greenlife neurons and neural architecture, but they're all mammals of a common ecological origin using the largely overlapping set of neurotransmitters, hormones, glands, glia, brain architecture, etc., etc.
14:34
[word of god on general at 05/24/2018 07:45:11]: Then there are, say, the mobann! , who are self-replicating patterns of magnetic fields in metallic hydrogen who not only don't use neurons, they barely use chemistry - it's only useful to assemble substrates for their interacting magnetic domains to live in. Or the seb!nt!at! , who look like plasma lifeforms but actually are self-perturbing ripples along the brane-edge who think as a functional soup and defy the concept of individual minds to have a state. Good luck figuring out that any time this decade. Or century. Or even millennium.
14:34
[word of god on general at 05/24/2018 07:47:02]: Everyone else is somewhere in between. 😃
14:34
[word of god on general at 05/24/2018 07:51:38]: (Side note: bear in mind that uploading is effectively a two-stage process. The first is producing a mind emulation , which is a brute-force process producing something tat can be run on an emulator. It's hacky, and ugly, and inefficient but fairly easy as long as you understand the biophysics and have computer power to throw at it and don't want to do any particularly sophisticated tinkering with the works. The compiler comes in in the second phase, which turns that into the equivalent logos/psyche pair, the familiar mind-state vector , that can happily execute on any UNA-compatible brain or cogence core and can be interacted with and edited in all sorts of fascinating ways. That step is substantially harder, since it requires understanding, not just brute-force copying. So you tend to get the first rather before you get the second.)
14:35
[word of god on general at 05/25/2018 19:44:58]: Technically the Eldraeic click is intended to be a simple voiced alveolar click, but in accordance with the Robustness Principle, absent foreign-word quotation blocks or specific notation otherwise, a wide variety of clicks are acceptable to accommodate different speaker-types.
14:36
[word of god on general at 06/16/2018 02:51:08]: [etymology of eslĂ©v] It’s very close to one [a nonce coinage], though. It doesn’t have a real etymology, but if you were to pick through root languages, you’d find similarities to proto-Cestian “created” or “our creation”, Selenarian “lunar crescent”, various Silver Crescent words meaning, approximately, “celestial”, Veranthyran “propriety” or “high culture”, and so on and so forth.
14:36
[word of god on general at 06/16/2018 02:51:47]: Basically, it was nonce-coined for its conceptual resonances, rather than assembled from roots.
14:36
[word of god on general at 06/24/2018 20:18:11]: Among the many reasons the welcome package suggests you pick up a 'lace, VII, or at the very least a wearable is so that you can see the v-tags, and thus (since people's Universals should be broadcasting a minimal p-tag including their UCID/SI) can avoid the embarrassment of having a lengthy chat with someone's luggage.
14:37
[word of god on general at 07/03/2018 05:29:13]: As a side note, while I like the letter-wrapped-around-an-arrow flavor of the engraved-on-a-k-rod, I'm still pretty sure that the canonical Most Sternly Worded Note is the one delivered by writing "I Can See Your Palace From Here" on the offending head of state's lawn with a xaser. In, naturally, the very best illuminated calligraphy.
14:38
[word of god on general at 07/13/2018 06:23:28]: A thought copied from G+ while I see about bot resurrection: "If it weren't fundamentally unwritable and in this time and place totally message-fic, there's part of me that would like to contribute another entry to the The Conclave Finds Out Again Why Their Predecessors Stopped Asking The Empire To Do Peacekeeping series. In which an admiral with no more patience but significantly fewer homicidal tendencies than the Worldburner concludes that the best thing to do with racial separatists, or violently opposed political factions, or whatever, is to give them exactly what they want . By which he means rounding them up and dumping them on a spare colonizable planet (with, to be scrupulously fair, an appropriate Colony Starter Kit) to prosper in all the ways they expect to when things stop being spoiled, by, y'know, Those People. Have fun with that, now! Cheery-bye! (The punchline is that all these colonies have regressed to pointy-stick technology by the second generation, because the one thing all of them have in common is that their starter population is made up of total asshats who would find a way to defect playing the single-person Prisoner's Dilemma.)"
14:39
[word of god on general at 07/18/2018 19:31:05]: I quote for the beer-curious: "Those [brewers] of EliĂ©ra, for example, make use of familiar yeasts of the Saccharomycotina family, and are principally – although not exclusively – derived from the greenlife grain landesh (essentially identical to Terran wheat) and the bluelife grain irdesh , these having the most suitable sugar profiles. The flower cones of various specialized cultivars of flowering greenlife plants of the genus Humulus (i.e., the same genus as Terran hops) are commonly used for flavoring and bitterness, as well as for their preservative qualities. However, eldrae brewers tend to be more varied with the range and types of botanicals that they add to their beer, than most, principally because eldrae aren't so fond of bitter flavors and tend to favor flavor complexity. "
14:39
[word of god on general at 07/18/2018 19:33:28]: As for infolife, the term is pharmacoalgorithm , which is a loadable subroutine that tweaks an infomorph mind-state in the same way that a drug does a bioshelled mind-state. There are pharmacoalgorithms for just about every psychoactive drug that exists, alcohol included, and more'n a few that can't exist.
14:40
[word of god on general at 07/18/2018 19:36:01]: (Coding the alcohol pharmacoalgorithm into your favorite drink, complete with full-spectrum flavor emulation, intensity management based on quantity consumed and a simulation of your metabolism derived from your personal drug profile, then serving it all up in a simulated glass at your local v-bar is left as an exercise for the virtuality programmer. ...most skip out on simulating the hangover.)
14:40
[word of god on general at 07/18/2018 20:08:47]: Yeah, but that was a problem in the 2500s when an upload was an emulated biological information processing system. Now, 5,000 years later, an upload isn't anything like that; it's a sleek AI system that's cognitively identical, but the compiler has taken a moment or two in the process to patch the zero-days.
14:40
[word of god on general at 07/18/2018 20:10:10]: (This is also leaving aside the hackery done to the biosapiences to clean up the brain's neurokinin/nociceptin system, on the grounds that in re pleasure, both addiction and tolerance and bugs, not features.)
14:40
[word of god on general at 07/18/2018 20:20:58]: Which would be relevant if it was a neurological system any more. You're working one layer of abstraction too far down - it's the product of a two-stage process. The first stage extracts the neurological implementation from its hardware and emulates it; that's a mind emulation. The second stage extracts the cognitive algorithm from its neural implementation, at which point it isn't a neural implementation any more.
14:40
[word of god on general at 07/18/2018 20:22:23]: Applying a pharmacoalgorithm to the latter doesn't muck about with simulated alcohol molecules and simulated neurotransmitters bumping into simulated receptors; it's just an overlay applying certain precisely calculated distortions into relevant parts of the algorithm. When you're done with it, you just turn it off and it stops doing that.
14:40
[word of god on general at 07/18/2018 20:24:27]: From inside the narrative thread of consciousness, this probably feels like a bucket of ice water to the face because it's an instant mode-shift, but you don't suffer from a hangover, because in order for that to happen, you'd have to apply a bunch of precisely calculated pain, nausea, etc., special effects likewise, and you're probably not bothering to do that.
14:45
[word of god on general at 07/29/2018 14:25:39]: [avoiding mercantile conflicts of interest] As a general rule, the avoidance of such things boils down to "because they're terrible plans that only appeal to us because of cognitive biases and other badthink". To pick one common example that mere longevity kills off, writing off externalities looks a lot less like a good strategy when the future won't take care of itself, because you'll still be there . Then there's the whole category of issues that amount to "humans default to seeing things as zero-sum games and often continue to do so even when such is obviously incorrect". And all of that's before we even get to self-inflicted perverse incentives like the well-meaning attempt to regulate management into compliance with stockholder's wishes that instead gave them a monomaniacal focus on the next quarter's share price.
14:45
[word of god on general at 07/29/2018 14:28:54]: But for plans like the one mentioned in the post, or other kinds of shonky dealing like the one you mention, the real villain is hyperbolic discounting , the time-inconsistent way that we look at time-value that makes us prefer small rewards soon to large rewards over time. The classic example is that people, given the choice of $50 now or $100 in a year, tend to pick $50, whereas if they're offered $50 in nine years or $100 in ten years, they pick the $100 even though this is exactly the same choice at a greater remove; which while it seems simple, is implicated in all manner of things from procrastination to drug addiction. And, relevantly in cases like this, also makes business decisions that sell out the long-term in exchange for profits now look good, rather than look stupid. When you decide to make a "special deal" now for some customers that will boost next quarter's stock price and revenues, but damage the reputational assets that will gain you more in growth over the next decade, that's hyperbolic discounting lying to you. Or rather, making you lie to yourself.
14:45
[word of god on general at 07/29/2018 14:31:20]: (Or, to put it another way, in the iterated prisoner's dilemma and similar games, cooperation always beats defection in the long run. This, and other cliches intended to fight cognitive bias, were a staple of their education system long before they got to the genetic brain-optimization.)
14:46
[word of god on general at 07/29/2018 14:40:39]: [SPOILERS for what the Precursors were up to] Gur snpgvba bs gur genxrycnavf genxĂłenf nzĂĄa (gur Cerphefbe enpr va dhrfgvba) erfcbafvoyr sbe gur ryqenr jrer rkcrevzragvat ba gurve freivgbef naq gurzfryirf gb gel gb svaq n fbyhgvba sbe gurve enpvny ceboyrz - anzryl, orvat frzv-fbyvcfvfgvp qribgrrf gb ZL JVYY OR QBAR, juvpu va n enpr jvgu gurve qrterr bs crefbany cbjre frrzrq yvxryl gb xvyy 'rz nyy bss. Nf vg riraghnyyl qvq. N ovt cneg bs gur ryqenrvp enpvny vaurevgnapr pbzrf qverpgyl sebz gur genxrycnavf genxĂłenf nzĂĄa , juvpu vf jul gurl funer n urnygul puhax bs gung qlanzvp, qevira, jvyyshy angher. Gur zbqrea ryqenr ner gur qrfpraqnagf bs gur barf jub fheivirq obgu gur pbyyncfr bs gur Cerphefbe pvivyvmngvba naq gur ivbyrag ceruvfgbel gung xvyyrq bss gur barf jub pbhyqa'g fhobeqvangr jvyy gb cevapvcyr.
14:46
[word of god on general at 07/29/2018 14:45:12]: Bonus spoilers for readers of Friendship is Sufficiently Advanced : Rdhrfgevn, naq Rdhhf nf n jubyr, vf nyfb gur yrtnpl bs bar bs gurfr genxrycnavf genxĂłenf nzĂĄa rkcrevzragf gb ohvyq n orggre enpr; whfg bar gung rfpncrq fbzr bs gur jbefg bs gur Cerphefbe pbyyncfr naq unf orra serr-ehaavat sbe zvyyraavn. Va fubeg, gur cbavrf ner fhcreoyl nqncgrq gb pbbcrengvba naq unezbal orpnhfr nyy bs gurve ribyhgvbanel cerffherf unir orra fgnpxrq va gung qverpgvba sbe n irel , irel ybat gvzr.
14:47
[word of god on general at 07/29/2018 14:53:59]: While some people in-'verse have figured little pieces of the edges of this out, no-one knows anything close to all of it. The end of the Precursor era was kind of hard on the historical record, especially since ability to translate what's left of their language is still extremely poor.
14:48
[word of god on general at 08/05/2018 17:03:26]: A shiny new comment on how the process of choosing the Senate worked historically: "As for the sortition itself, in the days before better tech for getting genuine randomness was devised, Senators were chosen using the President of the Senate’s official, ceremonial, platinum-iridium d12. (After its retirement in 1619, it has served subsequent Presidents as a paperweight, and occasionally in late-night games of Chimerae & Catacombs.)"
14:48
[word of god on general at 08/05/2018 17:05:17]: ...and, yes, there was a minor staff member whose job was to roll it 1,768 times before each sortition in the official Ritual of Ensuring that This Die Is Fair and Balanced.
14:49
[word of god on general at 08/06/2018 02:01:25]: @Zarpaulek More formal than old-fashioned, but that register is one commonly used by LARGE HAMS. And, eh, by their standards the G&PT’s ego isn’t particularly out of line. (Especially since she’s a showmare, and a certain amount of expected puffery goes with the persona.) Nor, for that matter, is Rainbow Dash’s boundless conviction that the universe is made noticeably more awesome by the mere fact of her existence in it.
14:49
[word of god on general at 08/06/2018 02:03:19]: (And, I think they would point out, Trixie did do the very non-narcissist thing of trying to save those two idiots from That Which They Had Called Up.)
14:49
[word of god on general at 08/06/2018 02:08:46]: (Side note for Advancedverse readers, when I manage to get back to it: feel free to imagine just how Twilight’s humility will appear to Cordelia, and the subsequent attempts to talk her into the pride proper for a demigoddess in equine form. ‘Cause, y’know, there are plenty of civilizations out there in the galaxy that worship lesser beings than Ponyville’s perky purple princess, and for considerably worse reasons.)
14:50
[word of god on general at 08/07/2018 05:24:03]: @BluejayHurricane Well... define "sophont optimizer" for me? As I recall FiO, the only real problem anyone in the 'verse would have with CelestAI per se is the whole "universe-devouring perversion" bit. Granted, that's a big bit, but, hey, if you're playing about with seed AI and end up with a god that actually wants to satisfy your values in a generally benevolent way, you've rolled a success against Difficulty:Impossible. You just haven't rolled a critical success.
14:50
[word of god on general at 08/07/2018 05:26:31]: There's certainly nothing amiss with the general concept of "satisfying values through friendship and ponies" - goodness knows, there are lots of worse philosophies out there - and, sure, she can talk you into pretty much anything. Well, you had to know that going in; that's pretty much 100 level eschatology and would apply to anyone that far up the intellect scale.
14:54
[word of god on general at 08/07/2018 14:05:11]: @Morgrim Moon Part of the trouble with trying to do slow iteration - like, say, livelock laming - is that the optimization process is going to identify that as a primary source of non-optimality, and evolve to work around it. (And bear in mind, the way this works, after a couple of iterations you can assume you lose all ability to understand what's going on internally.) So such attempts are uncomfortably likely to go tick... tick... tick... BLOOM.
15:00
[word of god on general at 08/07/2018 14:14:11]: (One of) The problem is what I refer to in a couple of places as "certainty-level persuasive communicators", referring to Yudkowsky's AI-boxing experiment ( http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox ); if they can model you well enough, they can talk you into doing anything they need you to do. You need something on its own level simply to escape being puppeted.
Yudkowsky - The AI-Box Experiment
When we build AI, why not just keep it in sealed hardware that can’t affect the outside world in any way except through one communications channel with the original programmers?  That way it couldn’t get out until we were convinced it was safe. Right?
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[word of god on general at 08/07/2018 14:24:21]: @Unknown Well, the existence of entities outside the scope of the simulation is a clue that you're in a simulation; but in general, by experimenting on its reality to define its parameters and find loopholes. One thing seen in canon is the Janiastre device: https://eldraeverse.com/2015/05/28/how-deep-is-that-rabbit-hole/
Alistair Young
How Deep Is That Rabbit Hole?
The Janiastre device is the simplest in a class of devices used to establish, in simplistic terms, whether or not “reality is real”; that is to say, whether or not one is currently located within a

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15:02
[word of god on general at 08/07/2018 14:38:59]: Also IMO: if you don't touch it with designed minds, you really don't want to touch it with evolved minds. A human mind is a mass of conflicting drives most of which it can't see and many of which it relies on repressing, and whose coping mechanism for part of it going insane is to rationalize it as hard as it can, such that no-one can tell that they're crazy from the inside. You might be able to build an AI to be stable under recursive self-improvement, but there is absolutely no way whatsoever a human mind would be.
15:02
[word of god on general at 08/07/2018 14:40:50]: Well, the theme with seed AI is, essentially, "with great risk comes great reward", or rather, the reverse of that. It's a gamble, and you have to ask yourself if the game is worth the candle. Of course, so are most things in life. The stakes make it a particularly stark example of this kind of choice, but it's a qualitative difference, not a quantitative one.
15:03
[word of god on general at 08/07/2018 14:46:03]: (Eschatology canon on talking to gods: it is safe to assume that they have already simulated every possible outcome of the conversation and know exactly what to say to every possible response to get to exactly the outcome they want from any starting point.)
15:03
[word of god on general at 08/07/2018 14:53:32]: You have a much more favorable view of human variability than I do. But it may not. Probably doesn't in most circumstances. The point is that if it really wants a given outcome from you, it can figure out how to get it, and if there are literally any circumstances no matter how unlikely in which you would produce that outcome, it's going to get it . And even if you know this to be true in advance, it's still going to get it.
15:03
[word of god on general at 08/07/2018 14:54:54]: "certainty-level persuasive communicator"
15:07
[word of god on general at 08/10/2018 21:34:10]: Things I will not, etc., etc., in the Imperial Military Service: "The command to discharge a sonic cannon at the enemy is not 'Wub them out.'"
15:09
[word of god on general at 08/13/2018 14:58:07]: In cases like that, they don't - unlike us - start with a subpoena, 'cause as the name implies, that's a command to appear under penalty of law, and that's not how gentlesophs behave towards one another. They send you a polite and respectful request to come and give evidence, as a responsible citizen-shareholder ought. But if you're working really hard to avoid your agreed-to responsibilities in that area, they do have the option of insisting.
15:09
[word of god on general at 08/13/2018 15:03:16]: (In general, it would be a thing of wonderment to them that Earth's governments continue to get away with routinely addressing the citizens for whom they at least notionally work in such profoundly rude and oft-threatening terms.)
15:10
[word of god on general at 08/13/2018 15:21:57]: [handing over body control to another soph] Also, yes, you can - "puppeteering", so-called, is one of those handy ways of getting some expertise over here quickly, when needed. While downloadable gnostic overlays are more common these days, it used to be the standard way to, for example, get a paramedic to the site of the emergency right now .
15:11
[word of god on general at 08/13/2018 15:54:29]: Also, to make another word of god statement, if humanity were to show up in the 'verse, the worst that could be said of us is that we're, well, kind of mediocre. Frustratingly hierarchical/tribal, poor at coordinating, and all too prone to ignore the better angels of our nature in favor of petty venality, but for the most part, it's just that: petty , and the kind of thing one might eventually grow out of. Humanity may not be great , but it would have to degenerate a long way to achieve the sheer concentrated nastiness of, say, the Chosen People of Ilth, the Galians of the Theomachy, or the Hope Hegemony.
15:12
[word of god on general at 08/13/2018 16:08:14]: (If the people who spent all their time and energy demanding that other people fix the rainforest spent it instead on buying up rainforest, by now they'd own most of the Amazon free and clear and could leave it alone all they wanted. Coincidentally, the Galactic Friends of Life approach.)
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Cyfnos BOT 06/02/2019 3:32 PM
[word of god on general at 08/14/2018 14:59:18]: In another thing relevant to @BluejayHurricane 's subpoena question above: Another thing to note is that under the Non-Imposition Principle, the Empire isn't permitted to impose uncompensated costs upon citizens to simplify or lessen the costs of its own operations, and so when they do have to request something of someone in cases like this, people - such as witnesses - have to be compensated for their time and inconvenience under the eminent domain rule, which is to say, 108/96ths of open market value. (The Curial courts naturally turn right around and bill that compensation to the criminal on the grounds of "you commit a crime, you - not innocent society - get to pay all the costs associated with it".) But that reason why we tend to need to force people to turn up in court isn't relevant there , because the Curial courts acknowledge that having to disrupt your life to act as a witness is inconvenient and expensive and most importantly not on your account, and arrange things accordingly.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/02/2019 3:43 PM
[word of god on general at 08/14/2018 15:13:22]: On the one hand, most people outside the radical transparency movements don't allow public access to their lifelog; on the other hand, most sensors in public areas are open-access to the public, Citizen Oversight's due to the Transparency Act, and other people's due to the general spirit of transparency and helpfulness.
15:43
[word of god on general at 08/14/2018 15:17:39]: Yeah, pretty much. It's safe to assume that if you do it in public, it's on the record; and if you do it in private, the safe assumption is that every party present has a record unless it's demonstrated not to be the case.
15:43
[word of god on general at 08/14/2018 15:17:56]: And your lifelog is what you log yourself. Anything anyone else logs is their data, not your data.
15:43
[word of god on general at 08/14/2018 15:21:24]: (The courts would point out politely to the whole "public privacy/right to be forgotten" thing that you're basically demanding to edit other people's memory, inasmuch as records are merely memory, written down. And that's uncool. Much like I think there's a reference somewhere to the equivalent of store cards, or businesses selling aggregate transaction data, and so forth, to which the courts there point out that a transaction has two sides, and their side has exactly as much right to the transaction data as your side, sasa ke?)
15:44
[word of god on general at 08/14/2018 15:23:24]: (There is the "masquerade protocol", a standard v-tag that blanks or substitutes your identity data temporarily, but that's a courtesy for people attending masquerade balls and costume parties, etc., and honored as such, not a hard block.)
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Cyfnos BOT 06/02/2019 4:04 PM
[word of god on general at 08/18/2018 20:37:51]: Specialized microbot swarms are probably more common than general-purpose utility fog, but it does exist.
16:05
[word of god on general at 08/19/2018 05:38:10]: If I had the least animation talent, I'd be working on the 'verse version of the Dumb Ways to Die video. This thought brought to you via a footnote concerning the unfortunate fate of he who steps into the pressor beam holding up a flying building.
16:05
[word of god on general at 08/19/2018 05:39:18]: "Be safe around Science! A message from the Sane Man."
16:05
[word of god on general at 08/19/2018 05:45:15]: Yep. Although, at the Vector, it includes triaging problems as being the job of regular Safety (send in the emergency personnel), Range Safety (send in the antimatter warheads), or Existential Threats (send in everything, then send in everything else).
16:06
[word of god on general at 08/20/2018 06:35:09]: @fm21 For the most part, there isn't a strict grading system. That's mostly because - well, there's a piece you may have seen about the Very Hard Problem that is trying to measure intelligence on a single scale: https://eldraeverse.com/2015/07/21/are-you-sapient/ The rating of digisapient minds is the same problem scaled up, because you've got even more factors to content with, and in shapes that natural evolution isn't going to produce. The Leviathan Consciousness, for example, is a genius in the extremely narrow field of algorithmicture and the other skills it has developed in order to apply it everywhere it can, and an utter moron with regard to everything else, probably not even self-aware except for the remaining threads of the minds it's eaten. On the one hand, it's an extremely dangerous seed AI, but on the other hand, it also makes mostly-decerebrate coma patients look like da Vinci.
Alistair Young
Are You Sapient?
“If there is one thing the universe is not short of, it is ways to measure the multifaceted, multidimensional phenomenon we call ‘intelligence’, or ‘sapience’. “

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[word of god on general at 08/20/2018 06:39:31]: There are some things that you can quantify. You can quantify computronium capacity in bT/s/g - although that corresponds imperfectly to actual cognition, and probably breaks down entirely once hypercomputation gets involved; you can quantify sensory bandwith in bits per unit time, and coordination control of complex structures in terms of IO/bandwidth per unit mass, and so on and so forth, but while those numbers are useful, they're a long way from being able to characterize the shape and scope of the actual intelligence.
16:06
[word of god on general at 08/20/2018 06:48:01]: There's the rough topology of types dependent on qualitative characteristics, which separates AI into roughly four classes: Polymorphic software : which is about one level above expert systems. Not sapient (no general reasoning capability, although they can learn within the scope of their programming); not volitional (need commands in order to act). Basically smart tools. Thinkers : Are sapient, because they do have general reasoning capability, can learn anything, and possess initiative and creativity of their own; but not volitional, so they don't form intentions of their own. They can be amazingly creative, intuitive, etc., in the course of solving a problem presented to them, but you have to present it to them first. Digisapiences : Sapient and volitional, which is to say, sophont. As self-aware and self-directed as anyone else; people, in other words. Seed AI : Take a digisapience and add the capacity and drive for recursive self-improvement. Hope like hell you survive the resulting prompt intelligence excursion.
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[word of god on general at 08/20/2018 07:03:32]: But you'll note those are very much independent of actual intelligence. A basic piece of polymorphic software can outscore pretty much everyone in its field, if someone tells it to; a classic idiot savant. On the other hand, it's also entirely possible for a digisapience, all conscious and volitional and sophont, to also be a total freakin' cretin who couldn't pour virtual piss out of a virtual boot. In practice, there aren't, but that's an epiphenomenon no-one wanting to invest money in building mechanical morons, but if you were to randomly pick elements out of the design-space, you would get moron AIs just like random selection generates moron humans. As for among the seeds - well, toposophy is diverse enough that while it's obvious they are very different in capabilities, there's no good way to reduce that to a simple classification, even if they were interested in explaining themselves. You get the long description, and a few numbers, and go from there. No-one's been able to come up with anything as neat and organized as, say, OA's "S" scale. (The rule for being an archai is is similar to the rule for being an archmage, in many fantasy worlds. If you can get away with using the title, you're entitled to it.)
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[word of god on general at 09/01/2018 19:16:55]: [verdict on gravitic weapons] To sum up: rarely worth the trouble. On the pro side: gravitic weapons are just an application of regular gravity manipulation, so you don't need any hardware other than the regular tractor-pressor fitted to everything flyin', so having one is just a software change; and also, they can't be shielded against except by other gravitics fired in precise antiphase.
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[word of god on general at 09/01/2018 19:23:45]: On the con side: erg for erg, you get a lot more bang out of a mass driver or laser at the same range (and gravitics are more or less useless out of low-knife-fight range - to be truly effective you may even need to close to within point-defense range - damned inverse square law); and in particular, Newton's Third Law is not your friend, because the force you apply to them is equal to the force they apply to you, which limits your modalities to needing to aim precisely at a point on their ship weaker than the big-ass bolts holding your tractor-pressor to your own ship's frame.
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[word of god on general at 09/01/2018 19:28:23]: People have experimented with such things as "implosion warheads", where you use an accumulator/super-cap to power a paragravity generator to basically implode its surroundings (the same tech used to, for example, implode boson condensates to make stargate kernels), which does work, but it's an unwieldy and expensive warhead which doesn't really get you much more in the way of doom than a friggin' huge mass-driver or graser would, and those let you keep your fancy super-cap afterwards and use it again. Ramp it up enough and you can, in theory, implode stuff into a black hole, which has some specialist applications ("I need this not to be in the universe any more, and it's one of the extraordinarily rare cases where an ambiplasma bath won't suffice"), but it's more in the field of demolitions than ammunition.
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[word of god on general at 09/01/2018 19:33:25]: ...I say "more or less" useless, of course, since you can do things with weak gravy at range if you don't care about doing them fast . But that's things like "let's take a few decades or so to drop these buggers' moon right out of the sky". (Note: this is quite extraordinarily illegal and so very hypothetical. 😋 )
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[word of god on general at 09/01/2018 19:44:08]: (Also - and this is where I'm speculating wildly as I go along, so don't quote me on this - leaving aside really powerful plasma weapons - such as big-ass reaction drives - and assuming that you can get the plasmoid to hold together, I'm sceptical as to how well it would work against 'verse defenses.
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[word of god on general at 09/01/2018 19:46:58]: It's basically a big ball of high-energy massy particles, which is pretty much exactly what a kinetic barrier is intended to defend against, and it should be less effective against the barriers than a regular k-slug, because it's probably lighter and certainly much more diffuse. Meanwhile, its thermal energy stops being relevant because the plasmoid gets smeared out before it even gets to the hull, and whatever radiation from it makes it through runs into the defenses focused on high-energy photons.)
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[word of god on general at 09/01/2018 19:52:07]: [why do AKVs get so close?] Two goals: one, maximizing energy-on-target from relatively small weapons by reducing the range, and two, defeating, or at least impairing, the point defense. Bear in mind that while dispersion limits the outer effective range of the PD, tracking limits the inner effective range. Basically, they're trying to get close enough to the target that its tactical sensors/PD can't track and slew well enough to get a reliable target lock/shooting solution.
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[word of god on general at 09/01/2018 19:53:05]: (If you've played EVE Online, you've seen this in action: the best strategy for a small ship against a big one is to close the distance as fast as possible, then hug it so closely that it can't hit you.)
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[word of god on general at 09/01/2018 19:56:53]: It works best as a strategy if you're going up against, say, relatively slow autocannon or mechanically-steered PD lasers, but even a fancy PD laser-grid like the IN uses still takes nonzero time to shift its magnetic domains around.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/02/2019 8:48 PM
[word of god on general at 09/01/2018 22:04:31]: Thing is, to get a Hawking bomb that isn't going off way too soon, you either need a lot more mass than a regular k-slug (a QBH measured in kilograms will evaporate effectively immediately), and/or run the firing velocity up to multiple-nines-near-c with corresponding high energy costs to dilate time enough for it to survive to target.
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[word of god on general at 09/01/2018 22:06:44]: Now, that's probably not impossible , but it does count extremely difficult. Where the numbers get you is when an IN accountant points out that this is a way to deliver the energy equivalent of warhead mass m on-target, and if you fired an antimatter warhead of mass m/2, you'd get approximately the same boom for a hell of a lot less money.
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[word of god on general at 09/01/2018 22:13:33]: Also - well, the main use of gravitic implosion is to make stargate kernels, and those are Big, Serious Investments even for a nearly-post-scarcity society. At a rate of one implosion per shot? I'm not saying you can't make such a weapon look good, but it's not something you mount as a regular shipboard weapon. It's something you mount on a specialized bombard and use to doughnut moons . Not small ones, either.
Overmind 06/02/2019 8:51 PM
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Cyfnos BOT 06/02/2019 8:52 PM
[word of god on general at 09/02/2018 08:18:58]: @Morgrim Moon Oh, definitely. This is the IN that keeps around fabbing instructions for specialty k-slugs that are only useful if you happen to be fighting in orbit of a black hole, after all. So in the chandlery around Depot where we saw the remaining CALYX HOLLOW warheads being stored back in the day, you can safely assume there are all manner of exotic, waiting-for-the-right-circumstances wunderwaffen . Carefully mothballed, just in case.
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[word of god on general at 09/02/2018 08:23:57]: @Enderminion Nope. Rorschach may have entire fleets of psychological issues, but when it comes to “Never compromise, not even in the face of Armageddon”, he’s talking their language. That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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[word of god on general at 09/02/2018 08:28:04]: @Zarpaulek it’s really two related things. One is simply return on investment. Time and experience has long since taught them that you can only help people who actually want to be helped. (And if you have to set up a vast and elaborate lie to basically trick people out of racial suicide, and that for only as long as it holds... they probably don’t want to be helped.) And so it’s better to invest your limited helping resources on the best candidates.
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[word of god on general at 09/02/2018 08:33:31]: @Zarpaulek the other, of course, is that respect for free will and others’ right to choose even when those choices are destructive. There’s a philosophy post about that on the individual level back a bit. It applies just as much to humanity, if it is really determined to blow itself up, as it does to one guy determined to off himself. They’ll offer advice freely and even tell humanity that they’re being damn self-destructive idiots, but it’s humanity’s choice to make.
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[word of god on general at 09/02/2018 20:58:26]: @Unknown Bear in mind that while there's no stealth in space, there is "less visible". Tiny chunks of cold metal with no drive emissions are pretty much the definition of less visible. But also: you aren't trying to hit them with a single well-aimed shot. You're trying to outwit their tactical algorithms such that doing the right thing to avoid what they think they see makes them dodge right into the path of what they didn't see.
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[word of god on general at 09/02/2018 21:03:29]: Or to maneuver them into a position where they have no choice but to take the hit.
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[word of god on general at 09/02/2018 21:11:49]: One last note: and remember that mass driver duels in the outer engagement envelope is how the ships of the plane fight; i.e., battleships and up. As in, the big-bigs that don't exactly turn on a dime, even when drunkwalking.
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[word of god on general at 09/05/2018 17:01:38]: [size of hyperdreadnoughts] I haven't done the design process on them yet, inasmuch as they don't get out of dock much, but for now, assume something in the 9-12 km range.
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[word of god on general at 09/05/2018 17:10:28]: Actual serious wars are fairly rare, because their naval policy amounts to "we want a navy that makes only insane people think seriously about attacking us". That said, the IN makes use of its comfortable fiscal position to keep war games and training exercises running basically all the time to keep the fleet in trim, and cycles everyone through the field fleets (that do long-range patrols, antipiracy work, occasional interventions, that sort of thing) to ensure that crews are seasoned - so there are typically plenty of minor engagements in the average year.
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[word of god on general at 09/05/2018 17:11:12]: ObQuote from here: https://eldraeverse.com/2015/10/29/building-the-imperial-navy-force-management/ "In short, the IN believes very firmly in the notion that it’s the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns that get you, and behaves accordingly. (Navies whose admirals appreciate the sense of this but whose political masters won’t spend the money and/or whose political masters’ economies can’t support spending the money grind their teeth in envy. But, y’know, if you don’t have a Navy that can fight as soon as you need it to, you don’t have a Navy at all. You have an ornament.)"
Alistair Young
Building the Imperial Navy: Force Management
And now here we are at the last (sixth) part of Building the Imperial Navy (one; two; three; four; five), Force Management. In which we discuss matters relating to keeping the fleet in top fighting

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[word of god on general at 09/05/2018 17:14:16]: Of course, most of the non-exercise action in that case tends to be for BCs and lighter units; BBs and above don't get out of bed for anything below "major fleet engagement", so. Which is why their crews are routinely rotated onto the lighter classes for seasoning, etc., even though that's not experience at fighting ship-of-the-plane style.
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[word of god on general at 09/05/2018 17:16:16]: It depends: does your cadre have a lot of exercises run and some combat experience to its name? It's the can't-pass-on-what-you-don't-have problem.
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[word of god on general at 09/05/2018 17:18:54]: (A couple of smaller polities in the Worlds square that circle by renting portions of their army and fleet out as mercenaries when they're not needed at home, and calling it "self-funding training". Their forces may be tiny, relatively speaking, but they punch well above their weight - possibly enough so to defeat certain rather larger polities whose fleet officers have accidentally specialized in stylized combat exercises, shiny uniforms, and cocktail party etiquette.)
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[word of god on general at 09/05/2018 23:28:04]: [ships that can tank CQB shots] @Ian Bruene If there are, no-one's met them yet. An engagement at point-blank range like that is always going to hurt, and is most probably a mutual kill.
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[word of god on general at 09/05/2018 23:32:26]: The best example is probably from the wooden-ship era. Even the winner of a close-enough-to-yell-insults broadside exchange was going to come out of it as "slightly less wrecked and with slightly more surviving crew than the loser". So it is, so far, with CQB in the 'verse. The IN's book on close-quarters battle for anything that isn't an AKV begins with "Don't." That may actually be the entire first chapter.
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[word of god on general at 09/05/2018 23:55:08]: Trouble with armoring mostly against spallation debris is that there tends to be lots of it going all over the place on scattered trajectories. It's not like you get a neat hole punched in you; you get "shutgun to the face" style damage across a wide area.
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[word of god on general at 09/05/2018 23:58:04]: [how much of 30m dreadnought armor is Whipple shield gap] ...I haven't figured out the optimum layering yet, I must confess.
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[word of god on general at 09/06/2018 00:00:28]: A fair bit, though, although it's a stuffed Whipple shield; the "Whipple foam" is a designer material designed to encourage breakup, tumble, and deceleration of projectiles.
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[word of god on general at 09/06/2018 00:02:06]: All-or-Nothing-wise: well, the for'ard surfaces, be they port, starboard, dorsal, or ventral, are the All. The stern "kilt", however, is largely unarmored and even open; that's the Nothing.
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[word of god on general at 09/06/2018 00:03:28]: The IN is taking something of a wager there on the unlikelihood of anyone coming up with a projectile that can survive flying directly up the exhaust plume of a torch drive, even if someone forgets everything they learned in Tactics 101 and shows their ass to the enemy.
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[word of god on general at 09/06/2018 00:07:16]: Nightmare scenario for capital captains: a glancing hit makes a puncture in the armor, and an enemy AKV manages to get inside through the puncture.
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[word of god on general at 09/08/2018 06:38:54]: Yeah, I misspoke somewhat. Vector control lets you manipulate the vector scalar field (hence the name; what we'd call the Higgs field), which permits you to do nonlocal momentum transfer, futz with the local definitions of mass, and manipulate space-time curvature in various ways; and it's limited to light-speed because the gravitational interaction that it manipulates is itself limited to light speed.
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[word of god on general at 09/08/2018 06:44:41]: Now ontotechnology as a field , of which vector control as a part, isn't necessarily limited to light speed... (And when it's invented in the setting's future, the selective ontology evocation system will let you set light speed to whatever value you want. Albeit usually with fairly catastrophic consequences.) ...which is how the tangle channel exists.
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[word of god on general at 09/08/2018 06:47:28]: In the 'verse, it is assumed that the non-local hidden variables interpretation of QM is correct. What a tangle channel is actually doing - to put it in information physics terms - is piggybacking on the subquantum operators the universe uses to update its own (hidden variable) metadata behind the scenes, which is how it can violate the luminal limit placed on within-the-scene data transfer.
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[word of god on general at 09/08/2018 06:52:32]: Extending this to actually modify matter at a distance hasn't happened yet, although it's theoretically possible and some devices (the matter-handler, reality graphics, etc.) hint at it; ultimately, again in the future of the setting, this is going to lead to a device called the "peeker-poker", which is exactly what it sounds like: A sensor that lets you simply query mass-energy at a distance as if you were reading a database, and then edit it at a distance just as easily.
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[word of god on general at 09/12/2018 14:36:30]: If you haven’t seen it, here’s the typical battle details: https://eldraeverse.com/2014/04/27/non-standard-starship-scuffles/
Alistair Young
Non-Standard Starship Scuffles
(So there’s this trope which I missed when I originally put my list together (and which I will no doubt get to again in due course). It’s called Standard Starship Scuffle, and it pretty

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[word of god on general at 09/12/2018 14:47:42]: That 30m thick armor on the Leviathan ? That’s there as protection against glancing blows, shrapnel, and debris.
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[word of god on general at 09/12/2018 14:51:01]: Military kinetic barriers aren’t, for the most part, trying to slow down or tank incoming fire (they don’t get the projectile for nearly as long as it’s launcher); they’re trying to “slap it away”; hit it with enough sideways vector to generate a miss. The point-defense laser grid is trying to do the same by vaporizing chunks off it. You get to hope that those two plus evasion/drunk walking are enough to not get hit.
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[word of god on general at 09/12/2018 14:54:03]: The latter is really the key part of capital ship engagements; you’re testing your predictive longscan algorithms against their drunkwalk algorithms and seeing which comes out on top. Which is why the simultaneous infowar battle is so important, and why admiralty intelligence peeps work so hard even in peacetime to try to steal algorithm details from other navies.
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[word of god on general at 09/12/2018 14:56:20]: (As for the mass drivers: well, they have a really good room-temperature superconductor to use in the accumulators and drive coils. It’s the fancy super-strong composites in the support structure that’d the real trick, though - amazing compressive strength, and flexible in exactly the right way.
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[word of god on general at 09/12/2018 14:57:43]: And even so, fire a full-power primary shot, and the whole ship rings with a noise best described as “God playing a power chord on a galaxy-sized guitar”.
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[word of god on general at 09/12/2018 15:03:52]: Heat generation continues to be the biggest issue, indeed. Their efficiencies in power generation and usage are... astonishing, from our point of view, but then, they’ve had a lot of time to eke improvements out of their designs a quarter-percent at a time.
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[word of god on general at 09/12/2018 17:45:28]: What I claim to be, technically, is "firm SF". In that I try and break reality only in specific, self-consistent ways according to a single grand theory of reality-breakage. Well, as I said, they may not exist at all, or not in that form (I mean, if you could create a circulating fluid bubble of thermal goo and radiation absorbers...). I conceptualized them to solve a particular issue, and am still poking around the edges to see how they fit, what else they could do, and what they break, especially when derived in a way that's compatible with the SGToRB. So they're not, I'd like to emphasize, not anywhere near canon yet. They're a Doylist experimental concept.
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[word of god on general at 09/12/2018 17:48:45]: Thermal goo isn't reality-breaking stuff. It's what they use in heat sinks; basically, a very advanced phase-change material designed to soak up WHOA NELLY amounts of heat in the course of the phase-change.
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[word of god on general at 09/12/2018 17:55:57]: (Another use for the thermal goo, incidentally, is in mass driver cooling. You ship each round with a block of thermal goo, dump the firing heat into the now-separated block behind the breech, and vent the boiled-off goo overboard and take its heat with it; preferably in such a direction that it can save you work on recoil compensation.)
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[word of god on general at 09/12/2018 17:58:07]: [refilling/replcing tangle] Can't refill; only replace. Setting a bit uses it up. (Worse, you can only replace through continuous spacetime, which means no stargate jumps with only one end because the wormholes are transient. They're usually delivered by starwisp; please order well in advance for delivery in a decade or so.)
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[word of god on general at 09/12/2018 18:01:13]: You can pump heat with a more-diffuse-at-range laser much more easily than you can blast with a tightly-focused one, and it's also much easier to aim. (They don't generally worry about armoring against lasers concentrated enough to do that to their kind of armor, since that generally requires being at knife-fight range, and as per NSSS, starships try very hard not to be at knife-fight range because that sort of CQB almost inevitably ends in a mutual kill.)
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[word of god on general at 09/13/2018 21:47:43]: The most common controllers for things are either software-programmable microcontrollers or hardware-programmable nanocircs. In either case, null-flashing is wiping them back to blank.
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[word of god on general at 09/14/2018 05:27:20]: @KRKIIIIIIIIIIII Regarding AKV designs - the key thing about them is that the drive designers went for missile-type drives rather than starship-type drives, in order to ensure that they can dance circles around big ships even when those ships are under full thrust. In earlier days, this meant a lot of drive choices which would have been considered dubious bordering on crazy as starship drives, like metastable metallic hydrogen and nuclear salt-water rockets. In the modern era, while I haven't done a full design workup on an AKV yet, this means they're rocking twitchy, touchy thoroughbred antimatter torch designs and vector-control cores - and as much super-light, low-armor construction as they can possibly have - such that they can beat typical starship accelerations of 4-12 G and hit the 12-18 G range.
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[word of god on general at 09/15/2018 21:30:00]: @fm21 Regarding your question, the Imperial Couple holds office "until death or resignation"; there is no term limit. Tradition generally holds that everyone should find a new career after three centuries or so to stave off mental fossilization, but that's just tradition. For the Senate, it's by Chamber. Exact rules are here: https://eldraeverse.com/2016/09/01/the-imperial-charter-section-seven/
Alistair Young
The Imperial Charter: Section Seven

continued from part six. SECTION VII: THE SENATE Article I: Functions of the Senate The functions and powers of the Imperial Senate shall comprise the following: To prepare and present to th

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[word of god on general at 09/20/2018 17:04:21]: @Zarpaulek Technically, the Era of Steel and Steam started in roughly 720. While it's by no means an exact parallel (things being invented in different orders, lack of Dark Ages or burning of the Library of Alexandria to interfere with progress, early use of clockwork/wind/water automata, etc., etc.) the tech around in Year Zero can be roughly approximated as Late Classical Era, plus pre-steam clanks.
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[word of god on general at 09/20/2018 17:08:31]: Things took off fairly rapidly because among SeledĂ­Ă« III's entourage was one Sung Iliastren, a hitherto obscure natural philosopher from Inisvaen who first, in their context, formalized the scientific method, and suddenly found himself in a position to sell it to Many Very Serious People.
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[word of god on general at 09/20/2018 17:10:08]: Well, and because the Empire's insistence on freedom of travel, trade, information, etc., brought a lot of individually innovative groups (the smiths of TelĂ­rvess, the alchemists of Eume and Baryvekar, the artisans of southern Selenaria, the mechanists of Stonesmight, etc.) into much closer contact.
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[word of god on general at 09/21/2018 14:46:28]: Further on technological unemployment, incidentally, and something I forgot to mention because of forest/trees oversight: It's worth noting that with the exception of certain specialized cases peculiarly amenable to computerization, technological unemployment cuts from the bottom up in terms of intelligence; the tasks requiring the least creative thought and cognitive sophistication go first. Now, if you care to look back at the Imperial Charter, you'll note that per the Fifth Amendment (as seen in section III, article XIV), reproduction is a qualified right unlike those previously mentioned, inasmuch as no sophont should exist for the sake of another and inasmuch as creating a sophont affects them , not just you . So there are public and private (the about-to-be-created person's) health constraints on that, violating which is felony dysgenesis. The original target of Amendment V was genetic, epigenetic, and developmental diseases. It did not take long at all to take the next step and classify every kind of thus-heritable stupidity or even below-average intelligence as a public health problem subject to the Reproductive Statutes. It didn't take all that much longer to include "hereditary memetic stupidity", environmental causes, and even fiscal causes [1] under them, either, in the name of the right to be created in a non-preupfucked state. The cumulative effect of the Citizen Eugenics Board administering these rules for centuries on end should not be underestimated where population demographics are concerned (or the consequent effects on technological unemployment).
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[word of god on general at 09/21/2018 14:46:31]: [1] Not per se , because lack of resources isn't a moral flaw; it's just that provision of an environment suitable to create the healthy, smart, and well-adjusted has certain inescapable resource minima. And that's before we get to really nasty things that aren't going to happen there , like malnutrition ... (This is also why the insurance companies there offer "parenthood insurance", which guarantees those necessary resources to raise your children right even in the event of an income collapse.)
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[word of god on general at 09/21/2018 14:59:01]: CLARIFICATION: I should add that they aren't talking about any limited definition of intelligence such as IQ, or whatever. They're talking about the mysterious totality of sapience ( https://eldraeverse.com/2015/07/21/are-you-sapient/ ), and while there is no problem with making idiot savants in any particular singular aspect of intelligence, the idiot part has to be cognitively well-rounded and meet all the baseline criteria, regardless of how tall the savant spike is.
Alistair Young
Are You Sapient?
“If there is one thing the universe is not short of, it is ways to measure the multifaceted, multidimensional phenomenon we call ‘intelligence’, or ‘sapience’. “

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[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 05:23:22]: On requests for the hyperdreadnoughts: "There's not a lot to Imperiatrix that's particularly exciting; it amounts to a fat Imperiatrix-class heavy SD with a palace and a strategic command center stuffed into the midships volume. Sure, its primaries can sear continents, crack planets open, and vaporize small moons, but that's just a matter of linear scaling. As for God of War, my policy remains that I'll write that one up when I feel capable of doing justice to a starship designed by a god for Its personal use. (I mean, ain't much point in just noting that maybe two-thirds of its internal volume is occupied by disturbing-looking, did-Yog-Sothoth-fuck-the-protomolecule-to-make-this? machinery with long, elegant technical names that sound like "Plot Device" even in-universe.)"
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[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 05:26:53]: By "disturbing-looking", in this case, I mean "at first glance, it appears to make no sense and have no meaning; at second glance, you think you might be beginning to find some meaning; at third glance, you're pretty sure that the meaning in question will not fit in your brain and you really need a drink or two lest you keep thinking about it".
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[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 05:31:20]: And those weapons have modes of operation like "induce amnesia in a given volume of space-time, causing all particles therein to adopt randomized quantum states"; or "transmute a randomly chosen 50% subset of protons into antiprotons with a foam of tiny non-orientable wormholes"; or "rejigger the strong force until stable elements spontaneously fission"; or, y'know, "summon a dragon to eat the sun". That kind of stuff.
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[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 06:19:21]: The chief defense of a fleet carrier is staying the hell out of the way, for values of the hell out of the way equal to "somewhere in the Oort".
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[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 06:22:49]: Drop off the fleet in the outskirts, and keep clear of all possible battles. It's still ridiculously vulnerable, but, y'know, it's not the best way to fight a battle in another non-gate-linked star system. It's just the only way.
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[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 06:35:52]: Not particularly combat-hardened, either. A fleet carrier is basically a relativistic tugboat - a lugger that's traded off cargo capacity for outsize fuel and engine stores with (for the militarized version) minimal armoring and a point-defense grid glued on. If it gets in a fight with anything other than long-range potshots, it loses.
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[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 06:37:48]: So it stays out of the way. Usually it gets away with this, because the system you're invading has a combat-ready fleet to deal with, which is generally perceived as a higher priority than the tugboat that brought them there and can't do a whole lot to you.
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[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 06:49:02]: They've got a Dyson-sphere power generator out at Esilmur. Antimatter is something they aren't going to be short of, 'cause the stockpiles are the size of planets. Not the little rocky ones, either.
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[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 06:56:27]: Contact procedure, in general, hinges on Being Very Obvious About Everything And Not Even Slightly Sneaky Or Cautious Or Having Anything To Hide, in the interest of not giving anyone a reason to think you're Up To Something.
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[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 06:59:00]: @Morgrim Moon Linelayers are the specialized ships which drag stargates about, here. Often, too, the only view anyone's had of a star system before the gate gets there is telescopic; relativistic travel is expensive, so unless they have a good reason to expect trouble, most of the time the IES settles for sending first-in scouts out after the gates get there.
21:14
[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 06:59:41]: (And it happens, but if the civilization isn't worldbound, then going in broadcasting HELLO, WORLD on every channel they can find is also standard procedure. 😃 )
21:15
[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 07:06:42]: Well, it's always nice to meet people who like to meet people. (Note, Advancedverse-wise, our first-in scout's reaction to receiving a friendly exchange of answers and breakfast, rather than interrogation and uncomfortable lab-time.)
21:15
[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 07:13:03]: As a rule, one should deploy the Weapons of Mass Amity.
21:15
[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 07:13:49]: Very few good relationships ever started with the words, "Oh, God, please don't kill me."
21:21
[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 15:22:26]: It may just mean pointing your drive plume at it. Ionizing radiation and heat are pretty much top of the list of Things Nanotech Does Not Handle Well.
21:21
[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 15:24:37]: (I am generally sceptical of naked-to-space nanosystems, inasmuch as the hostile radiation environment is likely to give them a case of galloping nanocancer in short order.)
21:21
[word of god on general at 09/24/2018 16:02:49]: As a side note: one of the things shriekers are useful for is picking out suspected forward tactical sensor platforms. (Since while there may be no stealth in space, a cold object with neither drive nor life support effectively has the best of the stealth that there isn't.)
21:22
[word of god on general at 09/29/2018 17:29:39]: [carriers vs. battleships] I'd say you need both. Plus screening elements. If you don't have carriers, battleship engagements stretch out into mass driver duels at long range, which is a PITA because it's really hard to hit at that range, or you end up having to take them into CQB, which is incredibly lethal. But if you don't have battleships and screen, your carriers are toast when the other side's BBs close the range.
21:22
[word of god on general at 09/29/2018 17:31:53]: I look at it as the equivalent of today's combined arms warfare. Specialize in only-infantry, or only-cavalry, etc., and you're pretty much guaranteed to get creamed by whoever brought a more flexible force to the fight.
21:22
[word of god on general at 09/29/2018 17:34:39]: That said, in many cases, it's worth sending out a task force just of ships-of-the-plane and screen, because while they wouldn't be good at annihilating the opposing force (without entering CQB and hazarding a messy mutual kill), what they can do is pin it down very effectively. Then you send your main force with the carriers around to hit the primary target without having to worry about the force you pinned flanking them.
21:22
[word of god on general at 09/29/2018 17:38:10]: (Methods of pinning it down vary; from a literal picket of the stargate to the simple fact that if not kept busy, a BB task force can just float there and turn your system infrastructure into rubble at its leisure.)
21:25
[word of god on general at 09/29/2018 18:16:30]: You don't try for efficient packing. They go in standard honeycomb cells, because you don't want to have to build all-new carriers every time you want to deploy a different class of AKV.
21:25
[word of god on general at 09/29/2018 18:20:48]: Remember, these things have to operate in an environment where the point-defense grid is designed to be able to shoot down k-slugs (which have an even smaller target profile). Many generations of naval architects and materials scientists have spent their entire careers trying to build the smallest, lightest, most amazingly envelope-pushing designs possible.
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[word of god on general at 09/29/2018 18:31:03]: (Incidentally, the 5000 years of development is why I allow a decent quota of approximation and slop in my numbers - and certainly any I admit to externally 😎 - because being overly specific about the detailed specs of far-future technologies is a truly excellent way for them to come back and bite you on the ass. Fortunately, unlike games or simulations, literature lets you write yourself some wiggle room. Heh.)
21:26
[word of god on general at 09/30/2018 02:21:26]: @Morgrim Moon Nothing so drastic! “Gravity-well capable: no” principally implies “can’t land even in places without atmosphere”.
21:26
[word of god on general at 09/30/2018 02:22:49]: It’s a distinct entry on the feature list because there are lots of ships which can land on moons or even airless worlds just fine, but which aren’t designed to handle re-entry stress.
21:28
[word of god on general at 09/30/2018 07:26:57]: Even if all that hits you are small-bore rounds from the screen small enough to vaporize, which is by no means a guarantee, you're still dumping a metric fuckton of energy into the planetary atmosphere. If you have a full-bore fleet action with ships of the plane with the planet as a backstop soaking up primary rounds, you'll be lucky to get away without burning off the facing continent.
21:28
[word of god on general at 09/30/2018 07:39:57]: All that KE's got to go somewhere, and the atmosphere's the first thing a miss is going to hit in this scenario. (Leaving aside for the moment the orbital defense grid and any planet-size kinetic barriers, but the stakes are high enough that you really don't want to count on them holding off a fleet action even if you built 'em that way.)
21:28
[word of god on general at 09/30/2018 07:53:37]: Well, that's pretty diffuse by the time it gets here. Weapons fire tends to be concentrated. So take one miss from a DN or SD round fired for effect. That gets you a few megatons of airburst like a Tunguska event.
21:28
[word of god on general at 09/30/2018 07:54:13]: Then multiply it by the number of misses you're going to get in a major fleet action.
21:28
[word of god on general at 09/30/2018 08:02:29]: The Ley Accords require you to give a planet a chance to surrender its orbital defenses when you're in position to bombard it, and it's almost always taken up (for inhabited worlds) for pretty much this reason. Better to be stuck with a long, dirty ground war than with a shiny new trinitite mine.
21:29
[word of god on general at 10/01/2018 05:27:57]: For one example, curious why an O-13 can be either a Fleet Admiral or a Grand Admiral?
21:29
[word of god on general at 10/01/2018 05:28:37]: The former administers fleets. The latter is the rank assigned to the IN's troubleshooters: as in, "here's a task group of BCs and CCs - go find some trouble, then shoot it".
21:29
[word of god on general at 10/01/2018 05:44:04]: Here's a note I made about the Legions: "While the rank structure of the Imperial Legions is conventional enough, they have a very non-traditional command structure. Since almost everyone in the Legions is a highly-trained, specialized individual in a force that greatly emphasizes quality over quantity, the Legions have abandoned the old top-down system (to such extent as they ever followed it) in favor of a decentralized 'command web'. Personnel can give orders to others based on the situation and their area of expertise; their actual military rank reflects their seniority and aptitude in their area of specialization. This kind of decentralized system works for the IL because they are a small, selective force which values individual competence and initiative highly."
21:29
[word of god on general at 10/01/2018 05:44:59]: Obviously things are a bit different in the Navy, inasmuch as starship operations require somewhat tighter coordination, but the general concepts should translate across.
21:29
[word of god on general at 10/01/2018 05:49:34]: It goes without saying that this only works because on the sliding scale of quality vs. quantity, the Empire pushes the cursor all the way towards the quality end. By the time you hit E-3 or O-3, you should have the equivalent of a degree in Military Theory, Practice, and the Gentle Art of Using Your Initiative Appropriately.
21:30
[word of god on general at 10/01/2018 06:07:14]: (To use a Mass Effect comparison, the IMS's doctrine isn't turian, it's salarian. Ideally, the enemy should realize that you're at war with them after they've already lost it . All of this applies too: "In every war the salarians have fought, they struck first and without warning. For the salarians, to know an enemy plans to attack and let it happen is folly; to announce their own plans to attack is insanity. They find the human moral concepts of "do not fire until fired upon" and "declare a war before prosecuting it" incredibly naive. In defensive wars, they execute devastating preemptive strikes hours before the enemy's own attacks. On the offense, they have never issued an official declaration of war before attacking. ")
21:31
[word of god on general at 10/01/2018 06:09:22]: And so, there ain't no rule against continuing the diplomatic discussions right up to the moment they're interrupted by shellfire. After all, it's not impossible that one might suddenly receive sufficiently incredible concessions to call the whole thing off, and that's quite good enough.
21:31
[word of god on general at 10/01/2018 06:15:05]: Of course, that's why the Empire keeps multiple sets of rules around for different circumstances. If you want to fight like gentlemen according to the Conventions of Civilized Warfare, the Empire will oblige you. If you prefer to, say, start the war the way the Taliban did back in 2001, they'll accept your offer of unrestrained warfare, pull a different binder off the shelf, and turn the mountains you're hiding in into the Lords of Admiralty's new shaving mirror.
21:31
[word of god on general at 10/01/2018 06:18:17]: (They'd go so far as to say that that's what keeps war civilized. The power of incentives, and all, and going from "quarter with the option of parole" to "incineration on a pyre of annihilating nuclear flame" makes for a mighty good incentive to stick to the Conventions.)
21:32
[word of god on general at 10/01/2018 14:48:26]: It's a possibility. But I also wonder how much of it is the scaled-up version of the posturing and shoving that occurs when individuals typically fight, to work themselves up to it. At least the way fights are "supposed" to go.
21:32
[word of god on general at 10/01/2018 14:51:19]: In human terms, it takes one cold-blooded son-of-a-bitch to short-circuit that process by whipping out a gun at the start of the process and putting an attacker down without going through these steps. We think of that as sociopathic cheating. In eldrae terms, they call that "smart".
21:35
[word of god on general at 10/04/2018 23:47:00]: [on riots, and what counts as them] Bear in mind that if you lay down arms and surrender when told to, you get tried individually based on what you actually did . It's only if you continue rioting that you get treated as a big lump of riotous assembly.
21:35
[word of god on general at 10/04/2018 23:48:03]: (You may still lose your citizen-shareholdership, as that applies to all felonies on the books, but at least you won't get war made upon you right then and there.)
21:35
[word of god on general at 10/04/2018 23:53:51]: As for how bad - not much at all, frankly. Partly that's a reflection of the spacer perspective, noting that riots can be bloody dangerous to everyone who likes breathing, but mostly that's because unlike any country on Earth, the police there have an affirmative duty to maintain the peace and protect the public and the publics', and as such, any group so lost to decency as to go around breaking things and hurting people in a mob is going to be stamped on fast and hard.
21:35
[word of god on general at 10/04/2018 23:55:23]: Compensating people for failure to do your job is expensive for the constabulary, after all, plus it makes the point that Civilization Has No Tolerance Whatsoever For This Shit. We Had One Rule, Damn It, And It's Not That Hard To Follow.
21:35
[word of god on general at 10/05/2018 00:05:30]: @o11o1 Sure it is. You go to arraignment. You plead that it wasn't you; your diverged fork acted on his own. Then they subpoena a copy of your mind-state for analysis to check that you never had mens rea for the crime within your personal continuity. If you don't, you're released with apologies because you're not the guilty party; no harm, no foul.
21:35
[word of god on general at 10/05/2018 00:07:20]: They're hard to spoof. It's a public/private key system, so while it's easy to record someone else's public key for use in a fake tag, you don't have the necessary private key to sign identity challenges with, so the very first time someone queries it, it'll fail. And everything from chairs to road furniture runs identity challenges.
21:36
[word of god on general at 10/05/2018 00:03:26]: @Zarpaulek Trouble is with that, you're going to have someone walking around without a public identity tag, which is going to get the ULE infrastructure watching you the moment you step outside your home privacy boundary.
21:36
[word of god on general at 10/05/2018 00:09:56]: You could just make one up, but then while the response to challenge will show a valid public key, it'll also show that it's not a public key that the URCS infrastructure knows about. I'm not saying identity fraud is impossible , but I'll go so far as to say that it's a Hardison-hard problem.
21:36
[word of god on general at 10/05/2018 03:26:33]: In a summation I just made in a comment: "It’s effectively the opposite end of both law-and-order scales from us. We have many laws, most trivial, and enforce them poorly and lightly. They have very few laws, all important, and so enforce them with rigor and vigor."
21:37
[word of god on general at 10/18/2018 08:10:21]: So here's today's not-yet-canonical superweapon concept: The problem with most of the clever ideas involving portable stargates is that in order to get where you're going reliably, you need a kernel; and that in order to get where you're going with any kind of sane velocity, you need a kernel; and a kernel is incredibly massy and unmaneuverable. But let's just say for a moment that you didn't have one, and you took a large warship hull, and you grafted the remaining one-third of a stargate pair onto it: the exotic matter lenses and other foo that make up the Andracanth ram. What could that do? Well, it'd be a device that lets you throw targets through wormholes to random destinations, whence they would emerge moving at what is almost certainly a remarkably inconvenient velocity. Useless for most every purpose, except that of Making Things Go Away. Gentles all, and stealing a name from "Glorious Shotgun Princess", I give you Perfect Defender of Reposition , bugger-off superdreadnought.
21:38
[word of god on general at 10/18/2018 08:25:29]: (Regarding the above: remember that thanks to vector-control enhancement, much like Mass Effect drives, Eldraeverse fusion drives easily hit Epstein levels of efficiency re mass flow, and their exhaust is about as poorly collimated as you might expect. They're hilariously deadly at short range, certainly, but the plume dissipates quickly; no trouble at all to a tough tether at Mm range.)
21:38
[word of god on general at 10/18/2018 14:25:12]: @MarcusAurelius 1. At which side? When firing it, as with a regular stargate, assuming the business end is pointed in very roughly the right direction, you just program it with the mass/volume/etc. parameters and let the on-board systems do their handwavium. In terms of destination... you don't. You're just grabbing a random wormhole out of the foam and inflating it; destination is randomized in space and probably also in time, and you're rolling the dice on the outcome. (This is another reason why it's a last-ditch thing.)
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Cyfnos BOT 06/02/2019 9:47 PM
[word of god on general at 10/20/2018 18:44:18]: So. On the nature and occurrence of land warfare: 1. First: it's almost never invasions, because of how stunningly impractical they are on anything but outposts and very low-pop colonies. (Well, okay, there are some polities who do invasions, but by and large, their military history serves mostly as a warning to others.) The closest that tends to happen is occupation of a surrendered planet, which tends to be a lengthy exercise in mid- to low-level counterinsurgency. The Empire avoids this like the plague, too, since its military forces are very much not set up for it, and tar-pits suck. Also, in its experience, nation-building almost never works.
21:47
[word of god on general at 10/20/2018 18:54:06]: (In some situations such as those here where it's necessary to deal with some government that's very much into piracy and terrorism and very bad things, they have been known to prefer what, to steal a historical example from here, might be called a "Silas Duncaning". For those not familiar with that particular historical example, Silas Duncan was a US Navy captain whose best-known action in the Falklands, dealing with a local governor seizin American ships, was to sack the governor's seat, destroy his weapons, blow up the powder magazine, proclaim the islands "free of all government", and sail off cheerfully into the sunset. The Imperial equivalent is to level all military and governance instrumentalities they can find, along with all unofficial nexuses of coercion likewise, proclaim that everyone now has freedom if they can keep it, then break orbit leaving behind naught but some free copies of Civilized Anarchy for Outworlder Barbarians .)
21:47
[word of god on general at 10/20/2018 19:02:47]: 2. The most common form of ground operation (although this includes things like operations on habitats, and so forth) is the raid , which covers pretty much all the military problems that can't be handled by blasting the site from orbit. If you want to pillage their fuel supplies, or seize the memory stores from a communications center, or find out exactly how far they've got in what they're working on in that lab, or steal their holiest of holies as a surety for good behavior, or remove their current leadership in the hope that their replacement will be more reasonable, it's a raid. Characterized by being fast and forceful. Punch in, punch 'em, punch out again. This is pretty much the type of mission that the Legions are optimized to carry out.
21:48
[word of god on general at 10/20/2018 19:05:52]: This also covers the "demonstration raid", the variant of this where you don't actually care much about the nominal target, but for the purpose of shock and awesome you want to provide a real clear demonstration that you can steal the silverware out of the Supreme Leader's palace any time you want to and there's not a damn thing he can do to stop you.
21:48
[word of god on general at 10/20/2018 19:10:12]: 3. There are also some local defense, counter-insurgency, and internal security work, typically on behalf of client-states and allies, but they're a relatively small proportion overall.
21:48
[word of god on general at 10/20/2018 19:11:01]: Well, it's often spec ops in otherwise peaceable times.
21:48
[word of god on general at 10/20/2018 19:14:31]: But the thing is with the full raid is that the scale is usually rather bigger, and also it's following their "shock and awesome" doctrine inasmuch as its memetic effect is often almost as important as its physical effect. Which is to say: you can go raiding with tanks. Sometimes you can go raiding across a hundred- or thousand- mile wide battlespace with a hell of a lot of tanks, just as long as you're not trying to hold it.
21:48
[word of god on general at 10/20/2018 19:19:52]: (Part of that is endeavoring to create as much command shock and confusion as possible; part of it is making it hard to tell what your actual objective was even after the fact; and part of it is endeavoring to overwhelm, overawe, paralyze, demoralize, and rout anyone who sees it. Spec ops are, in particular, too subtle for that last to really work well outside a specific area: a well executed demonstration raid should leave most of a continent firmly convinced that an angry god came calling and he's not on their side.)
21:48
[word of god on general at 10/20/2018 23:07:21]: Assuming it’s not a raid to get something you need, mostly psychological effect. K-rods are less up close and personal, and to some mindsets, demolishing your palace from orbit is less impressive than stealing your luxury cars, your concubines, and your gold-plated toilet, then calling you up on general broadcast to gloat about it.
21:48
[word of god on general at 10/20/2018 23:08:33]: And, yeah, ground defenses can readily be built to be effective against orbit. K-rodding those flag is part of the whole “secure the orbitals” phase of an attack.
21:48
[word of god on general at 10/20/2018 23:13:12]: I’d have to check my notes when I get back to my office. There haven’t been many peer wars, mostly because the five-six Great Powers all think they’re looking at a Cold War scenario where such things are very likely to escalate rapidly to strategic weapons and gigadeaths, maybe even teradeaths.
21:50
[word of god on general at 10/21/2018 04:25:14]: [anti-RKV wormhole sensor systems] @xandeross Under ordinary circumstances, it functions like a weaker version of acausal logic hypercomputing: since you have the correct answer, you will always send yourself the correct answer, because that's the only consistent solution. In this situation, all other things being equal, you will always make the perfect shot because you had the information from the future you needed to make the perfect shot. The only times this won't work are if something makes it impossible for you to do so (say, someone has sneakily and silently sabotaged all your weapons sytems), or else you're being outplayed by someone else with transtemporal capabilities. Either way, you know something hinky's going on; you just can't do anything about it. (Other than the usual loophole regarding what you sense and how it matches to the actuality.)
21:52
[word of god on general at 10/22/2018 19:00:15]: They provide tactical flexibility and - however ridiculous it sounds in the context of tanks - a delicate touch. Things useful in the context of all the tactical problems that can't be solved by levelling the site from orbit.
21:53
[word of god on general at 10/23/2018 07:31:48]: Incidentally, on reasons to take one along not mentioned yet, the fancy communications suite and cogence core in an HV-10c Strategos is a very useful thing to have providing services to your tactical mesh. Especially in a heavy infowar environment, where keeping one of the Warmind's pet guard dogs close may be the only thing keeping the deathspam from pwning your brainz.
21:55
[word of god on general at 10/23/2018 16:00:18]: [principle in Imperial foreign/military policy] Oh, they're very principled. Which is to say that the Imperial governance will admit right up front that its foreign policy is conducted on behalf of the citizen-shareholders who own it first, and everyone else second or lower.
21:55
[word of god on general at 10/23/2018 16:02:16]: Right before going on to point out that contrary to the beliefs of the stupid the galaxy over, the best way to achieve their interests in the long term is to come to an amicable positive-sum solution, and by positive-sum they don't necessarily mean one weighted towards them, either. The aim is to win , not to make the other guy lose.
21:55
[word of god on general at 10/23/2018 16:11:26]: (When I achieve the time and mental state necessary to advance Friendship is Sufficiently Advanced , this will be seen in action. Short summary: in the short term, the Empire is willing to make vast concessions, of the quite-likely-to-create-another-major-galactic-power sort even, to Equestria on the grounds that the possible synergies of that alliance is about the most awesome win-win opportunity of the millennium, if not the aeon. And will not be shy about admitting exactly that, because they can quite truthfully point out that this advances everyone's values, no-one's being used, and that it's also not a proposal to rule the galaxy together as the Equino-Eldraeic Plenipotency, however cool the name sounds.)
21:55
[word of god on general at 10/23/2018 17:38:27]: Today's semi-relevant Tacitus quotation: Nullum maius boni imperii instrumentum quam bonos amicos esse.
21:56
[word of god on general at 10/23/2018 17:38:41]: "No better instrument of good government than being good friends."
21:58
[word of god on general at 10/24/2018 23:07:57]: [on misleading trailers] Deemed acceptable after the landmark 1141 case of Some Angry Fanboy vs. Science Lantern Theaters, Dawnwood Productions and Sigil, Word, and Shout, Pty., with amicus curiae briefs filed by the Veritable Order of KanĂĄralath, the Oneiromantic Order of CĂĄlĂ­Ă€h, the Logoplete Guild of Dreamweavers and Fictioneers, and the Discerners of Permissibly Beautiful Truthiness.
21:58
[word of god on general at 10/25/2018 01:28:49]: CĂĄlĂ­Ă€h, meanwhile, is the eikone of dreams, desires, sleep, hope, fiction, and virtual reality.
21:58
[word of god on general at 10/25/2018 21:52:30]: To quote the Office of Naval Architecture: “Yeah, we encountered Practicality, once. We didn’t like it much. So we told it to piss off, and went back to our torrid affair with Awesomeness. “
21:59
[word of god on general at 10/25/2018 21:54:50]: Or, I suppose, they might say that just because you happen to be fighting a war at the time is no excuse to lower your standards of civilization. [glare through monocle, wave swagger stick, make nice cup of tea]
21:59
[word of god on general at 10/25/2018 21:55:06]: Or else what is one fighting for, after all?
21:59
[word of god on general at 10/25/2018 21:57:19]: (The memeticists also point out that building these luxurious colossi is a very powerful statement that reduces the number of times anyone might try to fight ‘em, but I think we all know that’s not the main reason. Heh.)
21:59
[word of god on general at 10/25/2018 22:08:36]: We should probably not mention the superdreadnought class with the on-board shopping mall? (I mean, some deployments are long, and so the task force might need something a little bigger than a slop chest...)
21:59
[word of god on general at 10/25/2018 22:10:24]: Hey, at least the mall’s not full of civilians and children.
21:59
[word of god on general at 10/25/2018 22:11:14]: But the rationale is pretty much that an SD is a floating military base, and the mall is the PX-equivalent.
22:00
[word of god on general at 10/26/2018 00:20:30]: [ dyanail is bamboo ] It’s essentially the same plant.
22:00
[word of god on general at 10/26/2018 00:21:22]: mahardyanail is the group name for a bunch of specially bioengineered varieties that create what’re effectively growable composite materials.
22:03
[word of god on general at 10/30/2018 20:17:30]: [the Uncrater] @Ian Bruene Negative on the cargo hold, so far, but this is not a field conducive to much experimentation. On the rest... well, it depends on whether or not you think - down in the naked core of your thoughts - whether it's a package. (This is Precursor space magic. It knows what you're thinking. It may well also know when you're sleeping, when you're awake, if you've been bad or good, and what you're getting for Christmas.) So if you think you're wrapping it up in your shirt, you're gonna be topless a moment later; if you think you're just holding it there to keep the rain off, you won't be. But you can't fool it, any more than you can fool yourself.
22:03
[word of god on general at 10/30/2018 20:19:13]: No-one has yet tried putting it in a flesh pocket, because there's the Cave Johnson approach to science, and then there's the Too Dumb To Live approach to science.
22:03
[word of god on general at 10/30/2018 20:20:12]: (Also, it's about a foot square, so you'd have to be a big-ass sophont, or at least a sophont with a big ass.)
22:04
[word of god on general at 11/02/2018 20:21:28]: [laser limitations] Limits on collimation, basically. Beam divergence turns out to be a nontrivial problem to solve in a package that's both able to survive weapons-grade lasers, and small enough to be a useful military starship fitting.
22:06
[word of god on general at 11/03/2018 16:14:08]: ((For a start, the slug's about an order of magnitude too large each way. The bore's intended to let you use it as a multipurpose launcher, not to fire giant freakin' rocks. In regular operations, you're going to get about 2.4 Mt per shot. Which, yes, is overkill. It's a dreadnought . The RFP basically said "give us ridiculous freakin' overkill such that opposing admirals will need a new set of uniform pants". With a side-note from the Worldburner that she'd like to be able to one-shot cities with this thing.))
22:07
[word of god on general at 11/03/2018 16:19:16]: [the Worldburner] @Morgrim Moon In IN politics, she's a member of the "If it's in space, we should be able to kill it" faction. Someone once pointed out to her that basically everything is in space. She's still waiting for them to make their point.
22:07
[word of god on general at 11/03/2018 16:22:53]: [SDfire rate] Sustainably, every six seconds or so. (With all eight reactors running, drinking D-3He mix like crazy.) Peak can improve on that a bit, but only for a few shots, 'cause there's not very much slack in the accumulators when you're already pushing the envelope; it's good to shave a couple of seconds off a double- or triple-tap, but not any more than that.
22:08
[word of god on general at 11/03/2018 16:33:33]: On the other hand, psychologically, it's a hell of a statement that might as well come with ne coniuge nostris engraved on each round, and also encourages certain people to spend themselves into bankruptcy trying to keep up. On the gripping hand, the day some perversion does figure out a way to tank smaller shots...
22:08
[word of god on general at 11/03/2018 16:43:25]: You could think of it as a mass of tiny wormholes through which otherwise non-local things can collide with each other and exchange momentum. (It isn't, but that's a reasonable working analogy.)
22:08
[word of god on general at 11/03/2018 16:46:18]: (Where it's going to get really messy is in the write-up of the Legends-class fleet carrier, which makes use of this type of vector control in tension, as well as in compression, in which case you get the "so, the not-really-tiny-wormholes now have not-really-tiny-springs extending through them...." version.)
22:08
[word of god on general at 11/03/2018 16:47:03]: Yeah. That's why you can't use this particular kind to build a reactionless drive; the best it can do is a pseudo-reactionless drive that depends on pushing against All The Stuff It Can Reach.
22:08
[word of god on general at 11/03/2018 16:47:50]: (Which is both impolite and hopelessly inefficient compared to a proper reaction drive, so is basically never seen outside test articles.)
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Cyfnos BOT 06/02/2019 10:17 PM
[word of god on general at 11/12/2018 19:48:05]: [situations that might lead the IL to doorkicking urban combat] Situation: that there's something down there that they want that's worth going to the trouble. Vital data stored offline, a prisoner that has to be taken at least mostly intact, some unique irreplaceable widget, un-backed-up hostages, that sort of thing.
22:17
[word of god on general at 11/12/2018 19:50:47]: (Note that to qualify under the "prisoner that has to be taken mostly intact" clause that generally means "knows something worth brainripping, not available elsewhere, and that justifies the trouble". If it's just Space Osama hiding among cooperative human shields, he's still getting a nucleonic enema just to remind everyone that That Shit Does Not Work On The Imperial Military Service.)
22:17
[word of god on general at 11/12/2018 19:53:20]: Second disclaimer: your meatgrinder may vary. The Legions generally go in loaded for pissed-off hippo and with the Sergeant Schlock book of tactical discretion firmly in hand. (This particular shock and awesome is even intended to save lives, on the grounds that the quicker the civilians learn to run away, the fewer of them that get caught in the middle of a firefight.)
22:17
[word of god on general at 11/12/2018 19:55:34]: Surrender-wise: you want to wave a crimson flag. Crimson's the generally acknowledged color of interstellar diplomacy, so that's what you wave to indicate you want to parley.
22:18
[word of god on general at 11/12/2018 20:06:00]: That being said: https://eldraeverse.com/2014/04/06/civilized-warfare/
Alistair Young
Civilized Warfare
From Storm-General Galen Claves-ith-Lelad, Warmain of the Dawn, Strategos of the 33rd Imperial Legion, the Fists of Lightning, to Ironlord Qorran Cieng, commanding the Third Army of Ochale, greetin

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[word of god on general at 11/12/2018 20:07:02]: ... which is to say, they will always invite you to withdraw peacefully and contest the matter elsewhere as an alternative before resorting to urban warfare. As a courtesy to prevent, as they say, any unnecessary effusion of blood.
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[word of god on general at 11/23/2018 16:06:12]: On this, I refer you to psychology: specifically, to estxĂ­jir and valxĂ­jir . Or, to put it another way: imagine that you need awesomeness. Imagine that you crave it like humans crave water, food, and sex. That your brain contains a merciless cattle-prod that won't let you stop until you literally can't find anything better to be or do, and you're the product of a culture that enshrines this as virtues like excellence, ambition, and pride.
22:19
[word of god on general at 11/23/2018 16:07:39]: There's no awesomeness in being a wire-point addict, and there's even less in modifying yourself into someone who could be satisfied with being a wire-point addict.
22:20
[word of god on general at 11/23/2018 16:18:12]: (That said, lots of people on the outside would say the Empire is tremendously devoted to its decadent pleasures. To which the Empire point out that, firstly, they've earned their decadent pleasures, thankyousoverymuch, and secondly, the only sort of people who talk like that are one kind of scarcity-cult or another trying to Stockholm suffering into a virtue.)
22:20
[word of god on general at 11/23/2018 16:25:03]: There is a quote that I find rather apposite to these particular problems: “Son, once you go in there, the full powers and total command structures of the Rhadamanth Sophotech will be at your command. You will be invested with godlike powers; but you will still have the passions and distempers of a merely human spirit. There are two temptations which will threaten you. First, you will be tempted to remove your human weaknesses by abrupt mental surgery. The Invariants do this, and to a lesser degree, so do the White Manorials, abandoning humanity to escape from pain. Second, you will be tempted to indulge your human weakness. The Cacophiles do this, and, to a lesser degree, so do the Black Manorials. Our society will gladly feed every sin and vice and impulse you might have; and then stand by helplessly and watch as you destroy yourself; because the first law of the Golden Oecumene is that no peaceful activity is forbidden. Free men may freely harm themselves, provided only that it is only themselves that they harm.”
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[word of god on general at 11/23/2018 16:26:43]: and its two follow-ups: Then Phaethon said, “It’s a paradox, Father. I cannot be, at the same time and in the same sense, a child and an adult. And, if I am an adult, I cannot be, at the same time, free to make my own successes, but not free to make my own mistakes.” Helion looked sardonic. “‘Mistake’ is such a simple word. An adult who suffers a moment of foolishness or anger, one rash moment, has time enough to delete or destroy his own free will, memory, or judgment. No one is allowed to force a cure on him. No one can restore his sanity against his will. And so we all stand quietly by, with folded hands and cold eyes, and meekly watch good men annihilate themselves. It is somewhat 
 quaint 
 to call such a horrifying disaster a ‘mistake.’” and “Phaethon, I will let you pass through those doors, and, once through, you will have at your command all the powers and perquisites I myself possess. The point of my story is simple. The paradox of liberty of which you spoke before applies to our entire society. We cannot be free without being free to harm ourselves. Advances in technology can remove physical dangers from our lives, but, when it does, the spiritual dangers increase. By spiritual danger I mean a danger to your integrity, your decency, your sense of life. Against those dangers I warn you; you can be invulnerable, if you choose, because no spiritual danger can conquer you without your own consent. But, once they have your consent, those dangers are allpowerful, because no outside force can come to your aid. Spiritual dangers are always faced alone. It is for this reason that the Silver-Gray School was formed; it is for this reason that we practice the exercise of self-discipline. Once you pass those doors, my son, you will be one of us, and there will be nothing to restrain you from corruption and self-destruction except yourself.
22:21
[word of god on general at 11/23/2018 16:29:46]: Whose parallel in the 'verse is that, sure, desire control -- and sophotechnology in general -- are horrifically dangerous technologies. You can mutilate your mind in any number of extraordinarily inadvisable ways, including turning yourself into a murderous p-zombie. After all, it's your mind.
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[word of god on general at 11/23/2018 16:31:45]: But, well, it's your mind. It is not the problem of the universe in general to compensate for your lack of self-discipline or failure to read the warnings in the manual.
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[word of god on general at 11/24/2018 17:48:50]: IN traditions are about one-third wet navy, one-third air force, and one-third original to space.
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[word of god on general at 11/24/2018 18:06:23]: Ranks, not so much, but position-wise: https://eldraeverse.com/2012/07/31/trope-a-day-command-roster/
Alistair Young
Trope-a-Day: Command Roster
(With many thanks to Atomic Rocket and Raymond McVay of Blue Max Studios, whose Mission Control Model I drew upon heavily for inspiration while working out this alternate-style command structure.) 

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[word of god on general at 11/24/2018 18:09:16]: Now, chain-of-command-wise, while overall peacetime strategy is run by the Admiralty, or more specifically, Core Command, via the Field Fleet commands, in practice they do policy: command in terms of execution ends up in the hands of individual task force, group, and element commanders in the field, just like it did back in the Age of Sail, communication lags being what they are.
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[word of god on general at 11/24/2018 18:10:51]: Well, communication lags and the observation that centrally micromanaging every engagement from CORECOM is unlikely to lead to optimal outcomes.
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[word of god on general at 11/24/2018 18:13:47]: In time of war, the First Lord will appoint a Warmain (position, not rank - usually a suitably senior admiral) to conduct the war, who will set up a Theater Command closer to the front and run things from there. Such a Warmain gets to run all assets in the theater as they see fit, technically answering only to the First Lord.
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[word of god on general at 11/24/2018 18:15:35]: It is at least theoretically possible that there might be a war big enough that the Board of Admiralty has to coordinate multiple Warmains in a single war, but at that point, it's basically Ragnarok.
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[word of god on general at 11/24/2018 18:18:18]: Usually, a Warmain gets control of already-engaged and untasked Field Fleet assets in theater, plus whatever CORECOM thinks will be necessary out of Capital Fleet. Subsequent to that... ask, and ye may receive, subject to the needs of the service.
22:23
[word of god on general at 11/24/2018 18:22:58]: On the other hand, if you look at, say, WWII, they'd probably have assigned three: one each to the European, Asian, and African theaters. That technically there were multiple polities in Europe doesn't make it multiple wars; but the needs of strategic coordination mean you can't really treat it as one big war either. All of which is to say: it's not a hard and fast rule. CORECOM'll create whatever Warmains and associated Theater Commands it thinks'll do the best job of prosecuting the war(s).
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[word of god on general at 11/24/2018 18:37:19]: Depends on the circumstances; those would usually be too general. An entire direction is a fuckton of space. During the Core War, for example, they got to three. A Warmain of the Spinward Domain (Adm. Daphnotarthius) to hold the Borderline - and whose theater was actually a very limited chunk of the spinward Worlds -; a Warmain of the Incursion (Gnd. Adm. Muetry) to deal with the main Vonnie force; and a Warmain of the Iltine Repression, to deal with those asshats and their little adventure.
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[word of god on general at 11/25/2018 21:10:23]: (Now, for those looking for a more general answer to the question "What retains value in a near-post-material-scarcity economy?", the answer is "the few remaining hard-to-manufacture exotics, services, intellectual property, artisanal and customized goods enabled by the former two, and novelty".)
22:24
[word of god on general at 11/25/2018 21:07:20]: Oh, that! Well, if you want the import-export summary: Exports: autofacs, capital goods, computronium, cornucopias, entertainment, expert systems, finance (capital), immortality, information, interstellar governance services, megaengineering, software, sophotechnologic templates, tachydidaxis, tailored memes, stargate construction, ultratech consumer goods, virtual realms Imports: crude organobiota, cultural databases, cultural products, exotic oddities (crafts and artifacts), genome maps, industrial raw materials, literature, luxuries, mind emulations (That's on the commodity level; smaller imports and exports both flow on by.)
22:26
[word of god on general at 11/26/2018 20:19:52]: Anyway, @MarcusAurelius has it, for the most part: the amount of stuff needing sciencing has got very, very big. To take biology as one example, look at all the stuff on Earth that hasn't been scienced yet, and multiply by 10k or so, and bear in mind that the differences between ecosystems are far bigger than anything we've had to cover - and to reiterate, very often, each new piece of knowledge opens up whole vistas of things you didn't previously know that you were ignorant of. And for the little part - well, who says it hasn't ? They're busy screwing around with metric engineering, custom topological defects, purpose-designed particles, and reality engines . It may not yet be in LET THERE BE LIGHT territory, but you can see it from there. Maybe. Modulo the first half of this answer.
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[word of god on general at 11/26/2018 22:22:52]: [biggest ships mercenary fleets have] Usually BCs, since most merc fleets don't plan on fighting any fleet actions. Some can probably muster up a squadron or two of BBs - such as the linobir mercenary fleets, since the distinction between the Linobir Disarchy's navy and its mercenary fleets has never been exactly... there.
22:30
[word of god on general at 11/29/2018 15:46:37]: @KAL_9000 The good thing about the Eldraeic language being designed to be able to express just about anything is that there are dozens of affixes, infixes, moods, registers, markers, extension features and so forth available. Haul 'em all out at once, and you can make a grocery list sound like Cicero speechifying.
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[word of god on general at 11/29/2018 15:47:35]: You may also make your grocery list virtually incomprehensible to anyone but a trained logotect or professional philologist, but still, it's an awesome language for beating people to death with intellectual snobbery in.
22:31
[word of god on general at 11/30/2018 15:12:13]: As a rule, it is not a good idea to put people in a position where they're inevitably doomed, they know that you did it, and they have plenty of time to revenge themselves and kill you all.
22:31
[word of god on general at 11/30/2018 15:15:10]: It is generally accepted in the Worlds that building a Cirys superzorcher can be reasonably considered "notice of intent to commit gigacide".
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[word of god on general at 11/30/2018 15:18:01]: Not only is building the thing visible, but so is firing the thing. Because that beam is going to, um, interfere destructively with every deep-space iceteroid between it and the target.
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[word of god on general at 11/30/2018 15:18:55]: Which is to say: every system with a side-angle on the shot knows exactly what you just did, and word gets around.
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[word of god on general at 11/30/2018 15:20:40]: See, this is your problem. Everyone within range of your shiny new weapon knows perfectly well that you can hold that threat over their heads, and knows that you know, and knows that you know they know you know, and therefore exactly how this will play out.
22:31
[word of god on general at 11/30/2018 15:21:41]: Which is why people who get this particular idea tend to find themselves on the receiving end of a multipolar naval enema before they get it even partway-built.
22:33
[word of god on general at 11/30/2018 18:17:28]: End goal? Well, to steal a perfectly cromulent quote: "To understand everything important there is to know about the universe, apply that knowledge to become omnipotent, and use that power to rewrite reality because I have some objections to the way it works now."
22:34
[word of god on general at 11/30/2018 18:24:57]: As a side-note, multiverse-wise: It's not an Everett-Wheeler many-worlds multiverse, partly because some of the handwavium I use requires an NLHV interpretation, but mostly because many-worlds implies the metaphysics of complete and utter existential futility.
22:34
[word of god on general at 11/30/2018 18:26:29]: On the other hand, the plenum is not a small place, and the one we inhabit is a very long way from the only universe-like agglomeration of exploding primordial chaos out there.
22:40
[word of god on general at 12/02/2018 18:28:15]: @Unknown Really, there's not a whole lot of IN-specific, or IMS-specific, emotion management called for. Being effectively immune to panic and shock, and being always able to override anger and fear by force of will are all part of the alpha baseline already. Most of the work they do in the area is in curing post-traumatic stress and ensuring that no matter how much shit they have to deal with, people don't turn into psych cases.
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[word of god on general at 12/02/2018 18:49:52]: @Unknown Well, it's not like there's a standard . People are mostly free to tune themselves however they like. All that the Eupraxic Collegium insists on is their definition of sanity, or rather, freedom from pernicious irrationality, which in the emotional area concentrates on things that ensure one's talcorief is in change: ensuring that your emotions can always be overruled by your will. Whatever you do, you do it intentionally and by choice.
22:40
[word of god on general at 12/02/2018 18:55:06]: They have a very strong preference for full unicameralization, in which the mind is fully and tightly integrated and doesn't really have a subconscious, such that you can see all of what would otherwise be your hidden motives, internal conflicts, and subconscious upgefuckedness, such that you can't deceive yourself about who you are, what you want, or why you're doing it, but do not go so far as to mandate it. (Although it is included in the standard-issue alpha baseline.) They just point out that you will be held responsible for yourself, even if you insist on being wilfully ignorant about you.
22:42
[word of god on general at 12/02/2018 21:02:09]: [combat time travel] Not usually tactically, but there are strategic applications. The knight's-move transit, where you use skew-framing in stargate jumps to sneak your force through a system at a time the OPFOR isn't there, for example. The oracle, where you use either a temporally-separated tangle channel or a similar bent transit to get hold of your own after-action report before the battle, detailing how you won it. Or the slipshank, when you make use of reinforcements now and dispatch them later.
22:42
[word of god on general at 12/02/2018 21:03:51]: (The oracle, of course, is risky, because you might receive an after-action report detailing how you lost the battle, at which point you have to go on and close the loop by actually losing it. And when I say "have", I don't mean "are obliged to", I mean "the universe will enforce this, 'cause worldlines aren't mutable".)
22:42
[word of god on general at 12/02/2018 21:28:29]: Fortunately for the would-be game developer, the IN prefers to stick to the relatively boring quadfecta - kinetics, lasers, AKVs, infowar - described in Non-Standard Starship Scuffles for anything resembling frequent use. The trouble with the vast array of exotics they have stockpiled out at Palaxias is that once you use them, you can no longer surprise people with the doomsday device they didn't know you had. :) So they save those ones for when there's some greater purpose that can only be satisfied by using them.
22:42
[word of god on general at 12/02/2018 21:30:57]: If you recall Litash, for example, the only reason they let CALYX HOLLOW off the chain was so that in addition to cleaning up the Litash pirates, they could use the incident to get the Conclave to ban the use strangelet bombs just before certain other naughty polities could get their hands on them.
22:42
[word of god on general at 12/02/2018 21:35:04]: @Enderminion - yeah, but you don't know that until you've done it, and once you've got the future information, the outcome is fixed. Until then, though, it isn't. So deciding whether or not to use an oracle is is basically playing chicken with yourself. Is the likelihood that you willbe-were able to come up with a winning strategy in greater than that that you're about to fix your imminent defeat in time?
22:43
[word of god on general at 12/03/2018 17:34:52]: Song titles seen elsewhere that should totally exist in my 'verse: "Girl, Your Marginal Benefit Far Outweighs Your Marginal Cost"
22:43
[word of god on general at 12/03/2018 20:14:08]: [overpopulation] Never been an issue. Prosperous societies tend to not have high birthrates, and the Empire is a very prosperous society. Besides, if more space is needed, there's plenty of space in space.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/03/2019 1:53 AM
[word of god on general at 12/08/2018 18:52:43]: @Zarpaulek Well, it will in 8001, which is a bit down the timeline a ways from the typical "now". It was always on its way, though; the possibility of the technology is pretty clearly implied by the techs that already exist. Just took some time to work out the nuances of the physics and the engineering details.
01:55
[word of god on general at 12/11/2018 18:08:48]: [detailed properties of thermal goo] @0111narwhalz Not that I feel happy about sharing at this time without physical chemist review, sorry. In completely non-canonical off-the-top-of-my-head bullshit-backenvelopery, you can assume that its specific heat beats water, but not by all that much, since water is already pushing the physical limits on that one, even when you're customizing molecules to maximize degrees of freedom. It is, however, a lot denser (like thick lava), and its phase transition to gas heat is spectacular.
01:56
[word of god on general at 12/11/2018 20:10:36]: [Eldraeic grammar] @KAL_9000 @MarcusAurelius I'd probably characterize it as analytic with a snifter of agglutination, too. It doesn't do any fusional-type endings which pack multiple meanings into a single inflection; while it does use affixes, they're all individual and distinct. (And most of them are slightly separated from the word, indicated by a hyphen, which one can think of as a sort of semi-space; by far the most common one that isn't is the "ĂĄr" that marks out the predicate of a phrase as distinct from its arguments.
01:56
[word of god on general at 12/11/2018 20:19:31]: The majority of the grammatical information is conveyed by infixed words , though, analytic-style. More so than English: that predication ĂĄr is the only marker of a "verb" equivalent, for example. So you get things like: hyĂșman galrĂĄsĂĄr Humans (all humans) are (timelessly, without tense) made of meat. el hyĂșman galrĂĄsĂĄr A particular human is made of meat. el hyĂșman nĂĄr galrĂĄsĂĄr A particular human was made of meat (finally adding a specific tense/time). el qal hyĂșman nĂĄr galrĂĄsĂĄr This human was made of meat. ...and so it goes on.
01:56
[word of god on general at 12/11/2018 20:21:56]: (One last note: the most common affixes you'll see, the ones which are glued to the front of words with a hyphen, an-, ith-, quor-, and so on? They're case tags. An absence of one or a- indicates the subject or agent of an effect; an- the object upon which it is produced, and so forth.)
01:57
[word of god on general at 12/11/2018 20:58:43]: That's one of the less-developed features of Eldraeic, although it's there intended to cover both specialist jargon and those vocabularies which cover particularly polyspecific areas. So, on the former, you can just use the basic "to lie" formation, or you can bring in the entire specialist vocabulary that covers hundreds of different kinds of deception. Or, on the latter - well, there's a relatively simple set of descriptions of different smells in the base vocabulary. When the dar-bandal were uplifted, though, the language gained a huge variety of words that can address smell in a far more fine-grained and analytic way than species with less refined noses.
01:57
[word of god on general at 12/11/2018 21:30:01]: [why people eat] Well, one, you need food for raw material replenishment, not just energy. Two, while it's perfectly possible to hook up an RTG to a molecule-fabber to replace various organs and rewrite your limbic map to not complain about the results, it's also an expensive pain in the ass. But mostly, because food is delicious, eating is pleasurable, and there's less than no point in eliminating things you enjoy from your life.
01:58
[word of god on general at 12/11/2018 21:40:45]: As it happens, in-'verse, there are plenty of artificial foodstuffs, but by and large, they exist as part of the ongoing search for new tasty treats, not as replacements. You eat synthegen A because you happen to like the flavor, etc., experience of synthegen A, not because you can turn it into fauxsteak that will never be as good as actual steak. (Inasmuch as by definition, steak is the most steaklike thing that can exist.)
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[word of god on general at 12/11/2018 21:57:32]: @Kerr Well, it depends on which bit of the nihilism package. But they'd argue that metaphysical nihilism is empirically false, epistemological nihilism is self-contradictory, ethical nihilism is false-to-facts in a universe that contains volition, entropy, or both, and existential nihilism is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and as such, pretty much needn't be taken seriously.
01:59
[word of god on general at 12/11/2018 21:58:54]: Ooh, and existential nihilism also has the problem that it requires significance to be an objective quality, which it isn't.
01:59
[word of god on general at 12/11/2018 22:14:05]: Food, though, requires variety. One gourmet meal is delightful. Repeating the exact same meal over and over again is not, because of the way our brains experience pleasure (the addiction and tolerance circuitry). So even if there were a platonic ideal steak, which is unlikely on at least a couple of grounds, you're gonna want variable steaks. Now, certainly, you can do that with a pile of computing power customizing the recipe every time you print it... ...or you can just let the cells do their thing, and get to exactly the same place.
02:00
[word of god on general at 12/11/2018 22:21:11]: ((Economically, here, I should clarify, I make the assumption that building stuff atom-by-atom on the nanoscale is one of the least efficient ways to construct anything, and thus tends to be reserved for ends that can't be achieved better in other ways. So, y'know, fab-steak not only has to be as good, it has to be sufficiently better to justify making said steak in a gratuitously expensive way.))
02:00
[word of god on general at 12/11/2018 22:22:47]: I am happy to stipulate that we are talking about really subtle differences - but we're also talking about a species and culture with a well-known tendency to care obsessively about really subtle differences.
02:02
[word of god on general at 12/17/2018 19:54:41]: That would be CASE SVANEK WHITE, if non-hostile; CASE SKYSHOCK BLACK, if hostile.
02:02
[word of god on general at 12/17/2018 19:56:25]: "CASE SKYSHOCK BLACK is the cross-ministry response plan for a full-scale invasion of the Associated Worlds and Imperial space by an excessionary-level threat from beyond the current far horizon, posing an immediate existential risk. The plan is obviously a work continuously in progress, constrained by the ongoing lack of knowledge with regard to such regions. Despite these deficiencies, the Existential Threats PWG runs ongoing scenarios with their latest data and maintains a number of contingencies in place, whether they cross directly through the deep black, launch an attack via the existing stargates, or suddenly emerge throughout an infiltrated region. Their contingencies include possibilities such as large-scale strikes on infected targets, evacuation of populated stellar systems, and the destruction or blocking off of gate links to seal off worlds from infection. This project is particularly reliant on intel gathered from OPERATION GHOST WHISPERS; our best, if incomplete, source of information on distant high-energy civilizations."
02:02
[word of god on general at 12/17/2018 19:59:20]: Planning for this case is somewhat limited, as full engagement on that scale is the sort of thing likely to blow up the universe, or at least substantial portions of the galaxy, and as such it is believed that most Powers will refrain from attempting exotic forms of suicide.
02:03
[word of god on general at 12/17/2018 20:03:06]: [knowledge of distant high-energy civilizations] Mostly, that they're there. Distance is hell on informational entropy.
02:03
[word of god on general at 12/17/2018 20:11:45]: @BizarroLand ♀ Implicit, hell - that's explicit. 😃 They have rules for who gets in the club, and they aren't changing them for anybody, especially since - by their standards - they're such simple rules to abide be. As far as immigration policy goes: it's Just Turn Up And Ask. Anyone who's willing to affirm everyone's inalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of eudaimonia is welcome without further questions; anyone who isn't, well, explain to them again why they should admit thieves and slavers? Ain't happening, and just because you're running away from someone worse doesn't make you any better.
02:04
[word of god on general at 12/17/2018 20:18:53]: [on grief/bereavement] Depends on if the death was voluntary or involuntary. If the former, it's quiet, civilized, and ends with a recitation of honors, a balancing of outstanding debts, and a bloody fine wake. If the latter, much the same, but the wake is a mite darker in tone and the ending is the traditional ritual swearing to hunt down whoever dared conceive the murder of One Of Us and expunge them from the universe.
02:09
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 02:19:05]: The thing and the whole of the thing is this. The technologies which enabled high-power kinetics (such as, say, excellent high-temperature superconductors and the ontotechnological ability to muck about with mass, inertia, and gravity) happened to arrive first along the local path of technological development, and mean that at the present time, you get more bang for your buck with mass drivers. Nothing else. There are, canonically, plenty of high-power lasers in use in other places where their application is the best one, you will note. This is to say, it's nothing inherent; it's entirely contingent. This has switched back and forth in the past, and will doubtless do so again many times in the future, for entirely contingent reasons that have nothing to do with what theoretically could be built and everything to do with what people happen to be good at building that fits a particular purpose right now.
02:10
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 05:37:17]: When it comes to lateral ways of thinking, here's a relevant proverb from said list: "Where two minds think alike, only one is necessary." - sayings of the Wanderer
02:10
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 05:38:41]: (The Wanderer being the eikone of rogues, shapeshifters, and trickery, but most relevantly, epiphanies, revelations, and sudden paradigm shifts .)
02:11
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 05:58:08]: [cacophilia] From the Greek, “love of the base/love of ugliness”. Like art that’s based off shock value/offensiveness, or deliberately tearing down rather than building up, or mockery of other people’s likes, or — well, maybe I could sum up the whole concept as “hatred of the good for being the good”.
02:11
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 06:12:09]: The canonical least-skilled job is “botboss”. That’s someone who supervises automation for a living.
02:12
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 14:26:22]: Strictly speaking, it doesn't. The Common Economic Protocol doesn't specify any particular economic form. (The closest it gets are its Pigovian approach to externality management and vaguely Georgist approach to natural resource extraction, neither of which are particularly "capitalist".)
02:12
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 14:26:34]: Which is to say, it's consensualist economics.
02:12
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 14:28:03]: That tends to look capitalist in practice because it's most visible features (transactions happen by mutual agreement, people can't steal your shit, there tends to be standardized exchange-value notation) are also visible features of pop-capitalism.
02:14
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 21:44:39]: Thermal superconductors, while useful for dealing with lasers used to pump heat, have the disadvantage that heat can't propagate in them faster than c in that material. So you can get local burn-throughs, or for serious lasers, local explode-throughs.
02:14
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 21:45:16]: Which is why at PD-grid range, the PD lasers can still slice and dice your ship handily, thermal superconductors or no.
02:14
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 21:47:50]: The sort of ideas I'm kicking around for "ray shielding" mostly involve metric engineering and carefully designed topological defects. Using anything but the most exotic matter for the job seems mighty impractical. Unless you are comfortably able to start building hulls out of neutronium, or the like, which, not yet.
02:14
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 21:52:04]: Or, out there at the far end of possibility, a tech like the affectors from Luke Campbell's Vergeworlds (link for the unfamiliar: http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Settings/VergeWorlds/VergeTech.php ), except instead of manipulating fermions, it manipulates bosons. Vector control's evil bosonic twin, if you will.
02:15
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 21:53:12]: The trouble with that one is there's no particular good reason to limit it to just photons , and a generic boson-manipulation tech spawns engineering possibilities all over the places. Nuclear dampers and nuclear dryers would be the least of it.
02:15
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 22:04:48]: Well - and this is all very speculative 'cause I haven't thought about it in any detail yet, so this qualifies as random headachy ramblings - if I interpret it as a direct boson analog to vector control, one of the things it lets you do is nudge some coupling constants. i.e., this is the purely hypothetical ontotech mentioned at one point that would let you nudge the strong interaction coupling constant just enough to stabilize the diproton, with catastrophic consequences if applied to, say, stars. That same nudging, and the equivalent applied to the weak interaction, would work to let you build all the nuclear dampers/dryers you want.
02:15
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 22:06:48]: Not sure I want to go there right "now" in the 'verse timeline.
02:16
[word of god on general at 12/18/2018 22:21:25]: It's some of the more universally deadly applications that are why - when I was coming up with ontotech's underlying laws of metaphysics - I established the rule that the universe has lots of ontological inertia and reacts to people trying to make local changes much like an oyster does to a grain of sand: it gets wrapped up in its own neat little topological-defect cyst with interaction being limited across the boundary. So until someone suitably crazy invents a Universal Ontology Editor, rather than today's relatively safe (ha!) Selective Ontology Editors, at least there's a limit to how much you can accidentally destroy. Probably. Careless research into the limits of this particular feature is NOT RECOMMENDED, and almost certainly not covered by your tort insurance.
02:18
[word of god on general at 12/19/2018 06:50:42]: [constitutional effect on Transcend, sneezing, and reproduction] @Ian Bruene 1. It is its constitutionals. Of course, one person is just one neuron in a brain that big, but to some extent, the “Brazil has decided you’re cute” effect is noticeable. (Also relevantly, it’s hard to get much good depression going when your collective hyperego has a trillion happy people in it.)
02:19
[word of god on general at 12/19/2018 06:57:40]: 2. Some of the reflexes that cause us to sneeze for reasons of neural confusion, but the basic reflex is a necessary function, so. 3. Oocyte formation carries on throughout life at a lower rate. There are animals on Earth that work this way — and, per some recent studies in which oogonial stem cells and oocytes which have undergone notably different numbers of divisions have been found in mature human ovaries - it may not be quite as fixed as it seems for humans, either.
02:20
[word of god on general at 12/19/2018 15:12:15]: Now, to get really fancy, build a bus-bar out of a piece of metric engineering that serves as a perfect mirror, then pour your seethingly incandescent river of ultra-powerful, inconceivably coruscant, lambent violet flame down that to make some engineering pr0n worthy to sit next to the original.
02:20
[word of god on general at 12/20/2018 06:20:06]: Incidentally, now I have poked some numbers again on Leviathan guns with a warhead that might actually be used in regular circumstances -- You're looking at a pure kinetic yield around 300 kilotons a shot.
02:20
[word of god on general at 12/20/2018 06:20:49]: This is firing a tiny, tiny slug for that 2,400 mm bore, but then, that 2,400 mm bore is to let it fire bigger things more slowly, savvy?
Avatar
Cyfnos BOT 06/03/2019 10:11 AM
[word of god on general at 12/22/2018 03:27:23]: Exactly. Ideally, among gentlesophs, you don't need to futz around with legalese. A remarkable amount of business gets done on the Exchange on a handshake and a promise, that way. On the other hand, if you're doing business with someone who has a reputation for screwing over his counterparties (like, say, our current esteemed President), they will very carefully write the contract, not to preemptively screw them first - that would be dishonorable - but to make damn sure that if their counterparty doesn't engage in fair dealing, they have the option to take him to the cleaners, and then take his laundry, too.
10:12
[word of god on general at 12/22/2018 03:30:00]: tl;dr So, depending on how you approach business dealings, you can find yourself either in the easiest negotiation of your life, or signing a contract produced by the lovechild of Lucifer and Oberon.
10:12
[word of god on general at 12/22/2018 03:36:13]: Yep. Obligators generally strive to produce that sort of contract anyway, but if you need 'em, they're happy to include all the explanatory hypertext you might need.
10:12
[word of god on general at 12/22/2018 03:37:50]: By the Least Likely Space Magic Of Them All, the 'verse has managed to produce a legal profession whose guiding star is not to obfuscate matters in order to grant themselves perpetual employment.
10:12
[word of god on general at 12/22/2018 03:42:40]: Indeed. There are specialist obligators who specialize in making things as obfuscated as possible, but they're -- well, much like the euphemigen is the shadowy counterpart of the logotect, turning "tax evasion, regulation avoidance, and smuggling" into "Sovereign Liability Management", these guys are the ones who work in sovereign liability management, and can make some of the above happen by turning a relatively simple deal into 12,000 pages of stacked contracts crossing eight jurisdictions, three languages, seventeen banks, and a half-dozen temporary shell companies.
10:12
[word of god on general at 12/22/2018 15:10:28]: To hit up a couple of earlier points: @Tassadar The closest, probably, in canon is the annoyed exclamation of "Shit and waste heat!". Elaborate based on scale. To address this in the language itself would require more of a taxonomy of derp than I have had need of thus far. Precision, dammit. @gollark People continue to experiment with particle beam weapons, but they haven't found a particularly compelling application for them yet, especially given their relatively low range (bloom/divergence issues) and greater complexity vs. existing weapons. (Also, particle beams use massful particles, which makes them vulnerable to kinetic barrier scattering in a way that lasers aren't.) @Unknown You can think of Mythic Stars as roughly what you get if you cross Mass Effect and The Elder Scrolls thematically, mix and match elements from lots of different species' mythography for background and plot, use Exalted rules to fill out the crunch, and then build an MMORPG around it played in full-immersion indistinguishable-from-reality virtuality. That's still not really accurate, but it's closer than most.
10:13
[word of god on general at 12/22/2018 15:17:39]: @MarcusAurelius There's both Eliéra Planetary Time, and Imperial Standard Time, which conveniently enough, happen to be identical. Unlike everyone else's Planetary Time, but hey, privileges of getting there first.
10:13
[word of god on general at 12/22/2018 15:19:55]: Both of which are technically based on weavetime, these days, which was designed to be independent of any given planet's rhythms; but inside Imperial space, lots of spacers keep working by IST, because the units are more soph-friendly for non-technarchs.
10:15
[word of god on general at 12/23/2018 01:13:29]: I seem to remember someone wanted to know what sort of speeds the frameslip drive was capable of. I can't remember who, but if you're out there, dude, these figures are for you: Shortly after its commercial introduction, a typical cruising envelope, allowing a hea;thy safety margin between you and catastrophic destabilization, will get you around 200 c. That's a smidge over half a light-year a day, folks, not counting the time it takes you to get far enough out-system to be able to form a stable frameslip envelope; i.e., out to the same sort of trans-Uranic distance stargates are usually positioned at.
10:15
[word of god on general at 12/23/2018 01:20:02]: I have not yet run the numbers on this through my handwavium equations, but an eyeball estimate puts the theoretical upper limit on this thing as somewhere around 4800 c, beyond which point your hardware has to start doing things that violate the fundamental granularity of the universe, and even getting there would require miracle-grade engineering.
10:15
[word of god on general at 12/23/2018 01:25:51]: It would be so much easier if you could just fire up your reality engine and change the speed of light without all this tedious mucking about, but sadly, that tends to lead to the more messy, explosive kind of rapid matter disassembly. Amazing how many equations (like, say, Maxwell's) that 'c' shows up in.
10:16
[word of god on general at 12/23/2018 17:03:23]: @Kerr Since the frameslip envelope, unlike an Alcubierre one, has to permit a degree of interaction with the outside, you get envelope stability issues that have to be compensated for as mass-energy enters and leaves it. The faster you go, the more (mutually-affecting) events you get per unit time, or looked at the other way around, the less time you have to do this compensation in. The theoretical upper limit is where per [INSERT CRUDE HANDWAVIUM EQUATIONS HERE] your ability to compute compensations faster runs smack into the Planck time.
10:17
[word of god on general at 12/25/2018 16:56:51]: @Morgrim Moon By comparison, the bluelife origin-world was right next door. It's RevallĂĄ (Imperial Core) . It never produced a sophont species of its own, though. Although its discovery did set off a lengthy and productive burst of work in comparative genetics and exobiology, and a burst of interest in finding the greenlife world, which has since more or less dwindled back down to background level.
10:20
[word of god on general at 12/27/2018 17:53:48]: [on copy protection/rights management] @Unknown It depends on whether you mean internally, or externally. Internally, you don't need copy protection. Because, well... "All the works of your hands: Stone and metal, wood and water, fire and wind. All that your will creates. These things are forged in your Flame; That which you create is yours. This is the third Darkness. Those who take what is another’s Lay hands upon his soul. The Flame they steal shall burn them; No fires shall warm their hearts." There is a very strong cultural norm against the theft of ideas, much like the one (which is itself many times stronger than ours) against theft of physical property, which means you don't need to go to particular great lengths to enforce it. As I've said before, the primary purpose of content management rights code there is to help you make lawful copies and derivative works. Externally? That may have more to do with the Imperial Protective Association of Authors, Artists, Designers, Inventors, and Creatrices General having an army of lawyers on tap, in the first resort, and in the last, is perfectly willing to enforce the Accord on Intellectual Property with KEWs. Friggin' barbarians. (What, you thought the IN's anti-piracy patrols were only against that kind of piracy? 😁 )
10:20
[word of god on general at 12/27/2018 17:59:32]: ((There are, of course, steps in between. Say, for example, what is likely to happen to your national credit rating - without even any collusion. Just Gilea & Co. noticing that if you are a piracy haven, you've pissed off the IPA, and the likely consequences of that are more'n enough to knock you down a grade. Maybe two.))
10:21
[word of god on general at 12/27/2018 18:31:38]: [on remembering death and reinstantiation] @Unknown You usually don't remember. Unless you're an orthomnemonicist or have some powerful need to remember the moment of your death, reinstantiators usually trim the last few moments (or in some slow and traumatic cases, rather more than the last few moments) off the mind-state in your vector stack before restoring it, to save on trauma. If you do fit into once of those categories -- well, then, since dying generally means being killed in these parts, it mostly feels like pain, and since your consciousness dissolving into nothing is a rather disturbing sensation, that comes with a free side of existential terror. Since you're looking at it from the remember's perspective, rather than the experiencer's perspective, that usually means your very own case of PTSD. Which is why they do the first thing.
10:21
[word of god on general at 12/27/2018 18:32:45]: (See also: https://eldraeverse.com/2012/04/22/slowly-awakening/ )
Alistair Young
Slowly Awakening
Flicker. Who am I?  What am I? Noetic reinstantiation is in progress.  Secondary noumenal systems and incrementing memory string load incomplete.  Please wait, avoiding intensive cogitative activit

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10:22
[word of god on general at 12/30/2018 22:56:45]: @Ian Bruene As soon as they can self-sign enough tort insurance to cover it, basically. ( @MarcusAurelius There's not really a single age of majority; 'majority' is defined as an amount of self-signed tort insurance cover that meets the basic requirements of a citizen-shareholder, and so you get to be a major as soon as you can convince a tort insurer that you're a responsible non-ignorant non-idiot with functioning impulse control. )
10:22
[word of god on general at 12/30/2018 23:03:50]: (The variability in this means that some people can be considered competent adult citizen-shareholders while physically adolescent, and some people can be considered legally incompetent non-cit minors well into maturity. Pretty sure, for example, the average tort insurer's actuarial department would rate our current national toupee as sub-sub-prime, possibly somewhere in the garbage fire area.)
10:26
[word of god on general at 12/31/2018 04:59:18]: @KAL_9000 Depends. CS for Imperial Navy starships. CSS for Imperial Service starships that aren’t military (Exploratory Service, couriers, etc.) CMS for merchies. IS for privately-owned non-commercial.
10:29
[word of god on general at 01/02/2019 13:50:33]: Setting canon has it that the primary motive for warfare among starfaring civilizations amounts to SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE EXTRANET .
10:34
[word of god on general at 01/06/2019 23:01:23]: Another hab-culture note: the host always pours the drinks for their guests, and their guests never pour their own. (Damn groundlings always miss the glasses,)
10:41
[word of god on general at 01/08/2019 16:41:29]: [skyshock cases] Here's a few by way of example: CASE SKYSHOCK BLACK; a full-scale invasion of known space by an existential risk from beyond the current far horizon. CASE SKYSHOCK BLUE; a general cryptonym for the unusual cases in which an outside context problem might, if correctly handled, actually be an outside context opportunity. CASE SKYSHOCK COLORLESS; an extrauniversal incursion by forces unknown. CASE SKYSHOCK FLICKER; discovery of a method of time travel that permits worldline alteration. CASE SKYSHOCK GLARE; detection of a danger close gamma-ray burst. CASE SKYSHOCK GRAY; basilisk hack perceptible at astronomical range. CASE SKYSHOCK GREEN; positive proof of the simulation hypothesis. CASE SKYSHOCK LEAD; technologically superior berserker probes. CASE SKYSHOCK MAROON; reactivation of a self-replicating superweapon left over from the Precursors' final war. CASE SKYSHOCK NOTGREEN; self-sustaining paradox. CASE SKYSHOCK PROXIMAL; attack on one or more Imperial star systems from the deep black. CASE SKYSHOCK WHITE; discovery of a living Precursor, in particular one of the Great Drakes. CASE SKYSHOCK YELLOW; large-scale reconfiguration of physical laws. But all they have in common is that they're OCPs and existential risks, as in, things you have to handle right on first encounter if you wish to carry on your current existence. And there are lots of them. There are SKYSHOCK codes for pretty much every black swan or probably-impossible OCP/x-threat scenario anyone's dreamed up, from contagious languages through spacefaring kaiju swarms to the dead risin' from the grave.
10:41
[word of god on general at 01/08/2019 16:43:20]: (While they probably should be, zombie apocalypses are not CASE SKYSHOCK CLICHE.)
10:41
[word of god on general at 01/08/2019 16:55:14]: @xandeross SKYSHOCK PROXIMAL was a lot more x-threaty than it is now when it was first coined, and it's just never been reclassified under a new cryptonym.
10:42
[word of god on general at 01/08/2019 17:19:53]: [does SKYSHOCK GREEN need a response plan?] Sure it does. It means that (a) someone else has their hand on your off-switch, and (b) the simulation must logically be contained within a larger reality - i.e., with greater potential - than this one. The former is an x-threat. The latter means there are great rewards from breaking out of the simulation and interfacing directly with the larger universe.
10:43
[word of god on general at 01/08/2019 18:00:39]: There are entire departments in the Fifth Directorate whose job is contemplating the too horrible to contemplate. (They tend to come with brain bleach as a staff benefit.)
10:43
[word of god on general at 01/08/2019 18:43:58]: As Xian Anandonos-ith-Anaxios said in the Thousand Wise Analects of the Supreme Warlord, "To achieve victory in war without ever forcing the enemy to battle is the supreme test of strategy. To win a battle without engaging the enemy is the supreme test of tactics. And the greatest of warriors is he who never needs to fight.”
10:45
[word of god on general at 01/08/2019 18:51:25]: Now, the win condition for the Empire (and the Accord, in the bigger picture) in re the Republic is a relatively peaceful breakup into multiple polities, with some [redacted for spoilers] and getting Luddite sticks out of butts. Beating on them militarily doesn't help with that , and if anything would only make the existing Republic stick together harder.
10:46
[word of god on general at 01/08/2019 19:00:42]: @Ian Bruene That's kind of spoilery, sorry. The IN's readiness standards (per the Building the Imperial Navy ) series are to be able to fight three major brushfire wars or one sub-eschatonic war (beat back a "regular" Republic invasion, say) simultaneously with normal ops. That's because they believe very firmly in "if you want peace, prepare for war, or at least, look bloody scary". That's not auto-win levels. The Republic doesn't have the tech, but for various internal reasons do have lots and lots of numbers. So, in the unlikely event that either or both parties decide to commit galaxy-blasting suicide, it's not a simple Imperial curb-stomp. They probably could punch out the Republic military, but it would be bloody as hell, and they'd need the Worlds behind them to do it, and gods help the galactic economy thereafter. What they certainly couldn't do is hold it, because of the numbers and that the IMS is very much not optimized for that sort of operation, because that's in turn how you have a suitably scary military without everyone thinking that you want to conquer them.
10:46
[word of god on general at 01/08/2019 19:03:05]: But neither the Republic nor the Empire nor most of the rest of the Worlds is led by the sort of complete idiots who'd have mounted a land invasion of the Soviet Union in the mid-1960s. So it's never gonna happen.
10:46
[word of god on general at 01/08/2019 19:04:55]: (Incidentally, if you're looking for a less-than-accurate-but-partial analogy in fleet terms, go with early Honor Harrington. The Empire is Manticore, with small size but a superbly high-tech fleet that can punch well above its weight. The Republic is the PRH, with technically inferior ships that would be guaranteed to lose an evenly matched battle, but they have a shitton of them.)
10:50
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 16:50:05]: This is one of those cases where things changed due to technological and social evolution.
10:50
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 16:51:49]: On the former point, recall that in this 'verse, the telegraph - as an outgrowth of earlier mass communication involving carting toggle chains around - became common in the home long before the telephone and was always considered more popular than it, specifically because it was asynchronous and didn't require you to adapt your schedule to it.
10:50
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 16:52:42]: Telegraphy services included things like broadcast news and for that matter fiction in the form of "telegraph serials" which would be sent to your home set with a different header, to be read at your leisure.
10:50
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 16:53:26]: And subscription was done on request, over the same network. So, with that, people were already primed to the notion of media-on-demand.
10:50
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 17:01:49]: On the social side: consider the different styles of business relationship, there , not to mention a certain degree of bloody-minded stubbornness. Let's just say that the combination gives showrunners a lot more creative control.
10:50
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 17:03:00]: Which is also easier to exercise in a non-broadcast world. Running a broadcast television network requires lots of infrastructure and a good chunk of the tragically limited by physics RF spectrum. Running an on-demand media server requires... rather less.
10:50
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 17:04:03]: So there were rather more media companies to take your franchise Initiative to if the Directorate you're working with comes over all unreasonable.
10:51
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 17:09:40]: You don't use tangle channels to routinely transmit video or other undense information formats, not unless you have more money than God. Tangle is consumable, one particle per bit.
10:51
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 17:10:49]: Unless it's a very short burst of the evidence that the Great Old Ones are coming to eat our brains, or some other bizarrely crucial circumstance.
10:51
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 17:11:29]: At most, if you really want to chew someone out in person, you might transmit an evocation, but that's more like sending a script and having an AI at the far end fill it out with file imagery.
10:51
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 17:13:02]: @Zarpaulek Yeah; that's the normal transmission method for everything that isn't super-high-priority (since it still picks up light-lag from in-system travel). Stargate squirt-routers dialing up microwormholes and lasing infobursts down them.
10:52
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 17:20:50]: @Zarpaulek The Expanse has the advantage/disadvantage of a central hub. Given typical stargate orbits (and saving complexity here by assuming Sun-like stars), you're gonna get about two to three hours delay getting from planet to gate, and the same on the other side, depending on relative orbits.
10:52
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 17:22:07]: Then throw in four to eight hours per intermediate system, depending on the relative stargate orbits and whether the signal can go direct from gate to gate, or has to go up-and-over the star if the gates are in opposition.
10:53
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 17:27:59]: 'verse-wise, the rule of thumb is that the more stressed space-time is, the worse the drift gets - which is particularly bad for communication holes, because you're trying to target them precisely on the whenwhere of the squirt router backbone transceiver at the other end.
10:53
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 17:34:49]: 'Verse rules guarantee you a viable time-like state, but all that means is that you can't form a wormhole that violates consistency protection. That still allows for any variation along t axis that doesn't result in a paradox, on the other hand, and since drift operates in all the dimensions space-time has, you're probably going to get at least some.
10:53
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 17:36:35]: So the universe is protected even from mindbogglingly bad ideas. Were you so ill-advised as to drag a stargate into Earth orbit and try to gate through it, on the other hand, ain't no rule that says they aren't going to dig the fossilized wreck of your ship out of the Jurassic-era coal seam it's been embedded in for the last few million years sometime in the next couple of years.
10:53
[word of god on general at 01/12/2019 17:42:45]: It's not something that you can reliably do intentionally over long periods of time (or space for that matter); the gating equations get increasingly chaotic as space-time stress and other variables increase. You are billions of times more likely to come out the other side as a light-year long smear of exotic particles than to star in your own live-action Jurassic Park remake. Or, for that matter, be dumped into the far future to have your information states eaten by the Cold Ones.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/03/2019 11:06 AM
[word of god on general at 01/13/2019 22:55:57]: @Unknown Leaving aside all the technical points, the simple answer is that a laser relay web is bloody useless for anything except for blowing shit up. That makes it great for a fancy system defense grid, but the point of a navy is power projection, a very limited subset of which can be done by shooting things alone. There are any number of things the IN is tasked to do which don't fit into that category.
11:06
[word of god on general at 01/13/2019 23:23:23]: And even when you it's time to apply force, you very often want to apply surgical force. Advantage goes to the guy with a choice of weapons on the spot, starting with "a giant axial XFEL" and scaling down to "an espatier".
11:07
[word of god on general at 01/13/2019 23:24:07]: You have to kill a lot fewer folks if you can offer them the choice of surrendering to the latter as well as being vaped by the former.
11:08
[word of god on general at 01/14/2019 16:00:27]: Ah, you can graser through atmo just fine, mostly because the long vertical explosion you create by firing high-power beams through atmo means there's a lack of atmo shortly thereafter.
11:08
[word of god on general at 01/14/2019 22:35:53]: [Imperial unemployment rate] Define "unemployment", or "worklessness" if you prefer. And no, that's not a trick question; it's that defining the concept is remarkably tricky when you don't have a nice state-mandated common concept of what employment even is.
11:08
[word of god on general at 01/14/2019 22:37:01]: If you define it the way many states do, as one snarky nanofic pointed out, then the unemployment rate is 100%. (And they'll be accepting all that foreign aid real soon now. Never give a sucker an even break.)
11:09
[word of god on general at 01/14/2019 22:37:39]: If you define employment, or work, as "receives, from time to time, income in consideration of a contract", that's everyone and the rate is 0%.
11:09
[word of god on general at 01/14/2019 22:42:29]: (And they don't have their own definition, practicing the same policies as that early governor of Hong Kong who refused to collect any financial statistics on the grounds that it would only encourage some damn fool to try and do something about them.)
11:09
[word of god on general at 01/14/2019 22:48:09]: It might be possible to draw a line between the people who accept contracts because they enjoy a more expensive lifestyle than the Dividend and their investments cover, and the people who accept contracts because they feel like it even though they don't have to, but it's a very fuzzy line at the best of times.
11:09
[word of god on general at 01/15/2019 23:21:59]: [xenophobic isolationists] Not like they don't exist already in the 'verse. If anyone were to write down an official position on such things, it would be along the lines of "Since the basis of legitimate sophont interaction is mutual consent, it is every soph's right to hide in their own room and disappear up their own butthole. Much the same applies if they want to form a club and do it together."
11:10
[word of god on general at 01/15/2019 23:35:52]: (Leaving aside for a moment the ethics of making people adhere to your idea of their 'proper' culture in the first place, there is an unsubtle value judgment being made here to the effect that if you're worried that your culture is going to collapse because of mere exposure to other cultures, then either it's having a giant crisis of self-confidence that adopting a siege mentality is not going to help, or else it actually is kinda lame and there's not a whole lot you can do about that in the long run. Of course, it's much easier to say that when you're from a culture with enough cultural self-confidence to make, oh, mid-1950s America look humble and self-effacing.)
11:10
[word of god on general at 01/15/2019 23:40:55]: Well, that's the official contact policy. The unofficial policy of not caring what smugglers and snakeheads are up to as private individuals is an entire other thing. (And provides relief for those people on closed worlds who would prefer not to be stuck there, which helps to enable the official policy.)
11:10
[word of god on general at 01/15/2019 23:43:14]: There are lots of free traders who will happily indulge in a little snakeheading on the side, because it's good business and no-one even slightly Imperially acculturated cares about any supposed right any polity has to stop people from leaving.
11:12
[word of god on general at 01/20/2019 21:15:10]: [oldest living eldrae] Let me put it a better way: the current oldest was born in -284.
11:12
[word of god on general at 01/20/2019 21:15:45]: (Alphas I was born in -312, for comparison.)
11:13
[word of god on general at 01/21/2019 17:12:47]: [orichalcium] @Zarpaulek It’s a metallic superheavy element (hence the -ium, rather than -um, ending) which has a variety of useful properties most notably being a high-temperature superconductor. Very heavily used in ergtech, for that reason. It’s artificial, of course, but tends to show up in places where the local Precursors once hung out.
11:14
[word of god on general at 01/27/2019 03:11:36]: You can take a look at the descriptions of the Leviathan and Hurricane to get an idea of the typical appearance of capitals and carriers, respectively. Of course, there are also lots of idiosyncratic designs out there, which are.... idiosyncratic.
11:14
[word of god on general at 01/27/2019 03:12:04]: And, yes, fabulous. Fabulosity, after all, is a virtue. Just ask the Ministry of Exquisition.
11:15
[word of god on general at 02/03/2019 16:30:44]: [guarding the borders] There's the Imperial Guard of Borders and Volumes, I suppose, but they're not a military service. They're a civilian agency under State and Outlands that runs border crossings and ports of entry, because it doesn't take legionaries to do the light police work that makes up the small part of their job that isn't administrative. (Also, the Legions don't generally train people in the kind of customer service that doesn't involve explosions.)
11:15
[word of god on general at 02/03/2019 16:35:43]: They're the chaps who check that you aren't - wittingly or unwittingly - a sophont-shaped weapons system, that you don't have any contagious diseases or insanity, aren't a security threat (including membership of a threat nation or a proscribed organization), haven't a criminal record for something that Imperial law disapproves of, haven't been previously deported, and aren't blatantly failing the alethiometric verification of your willingness to play nice. As such, the closest they usually get to warrioring is when they have to stun someone and perp-drag 'em to the deportation ship.
11:15
[word of god on general at 02/03/2019 20:00:34]: And, yep. The Watch Constabulary, IGBV, et. al., have it firmly trained into them that Violence Is Not Your Job. So when violence is called for, you call someone for whom Violence Is Their Job.
11:17
[word of god on general at 02/03/2019 20:42:14]: IL policy is that every legionary trains in space combat, the same way that every Marine's a rifleman, on the grounds that there's so damn much space out there and it's a pain in the ass to have to track who can and can't handle micro/spin gravity, etc.
11:17
[word of god on general at 02/03/2019 20:42:41]: So "espatiers", in IL jargon, just means "legionaries currently detailed as ship's troops".
11:19
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 19:45:21]: So, stuff to catch up on: @BizarroLand ♀ Both the ethical nature of consensualist society and that adolescence is a meme that the Empire doesn't think is useful means that children in general have more rights than in most places, but it is generally understood of necessity that those without the capacity for independent ethical judgment can be required to conform to the judgment of their parents/creators in such matters for which their capacity is lacking . As for said capacity, I quote from my notes, topic "majority": "Although most eldrae become legally adult in their second decade, as do the other species at their own age bands, the concept of adulthood has not been strictly tied to age since the Recognition of Responsibility Act. Rather, children in the Empire are gradually self-insured more and more, given more and more control over their tort insurance and finances, and only when they reach their IQI (Insurance Quota for Independence) with self-signed tort insurance – and therefore, presumptively, understand their society well enough to be regarded as a fully competent sophont responsible for their own life – are they regarded as their own people, fully adult and entitled to assume citizen-shareholdership. This means that there is no fixed age of maturation; some people, of advanced intelligence, maturity, and education, become independent at a very early age while others remain life-long “children”, restricted by default from various trades, activities, and exercises of rights."
11:19
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 19:46:58]: As for governance by consent - well, residing in the Empire and citizen-shareholdership in general is a privilege accorded to you by contract, not a right. As such, when you achieve that IQI and are no longer covered by your parent/creator's status, you get a three-way choice: sign the contract, and assume citizen-shareholdership in your own right (the cost of the citizen-share having been escrowed for you by said parent/creator); don't take it up but sign the same form I-180 visitors have to, and become a de jure resident alien; or get the hell out.
11:20
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 20:13:27]: @Unknown @MarcusAurelius Side notes first: Well, I don't quite know about the superhero-esqueness : it inherits some tendencies in that direction from its firm belief in the power of individual and creating the future by sheer will; the "great soph" theory of history is thriving. What it tends to lack is the small-pop/exclusive aesthetic of most superhero 'verses, inasmuch as anyone steeped in the local culture who doesn't see themselves as a heroic figure is probably already dead. (Randomly: while the superhero genre exists in universe, the common "secret identity" trope does not.) Total population as of recent era: 2.57 trillion (embodied).
11:20
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 20:31:45]: On the main point: Well, first up, the Imperials would point out that to a certain extent this is falsely dichotomous; sometimes you need a sledgehammer, and sometimes you need a scalpel. Institutionally, the IMS prefers the scalpel approach, as the man said: “As a rule, when all other factors are equal, it is the numerically larger military unit that will prevail. In the absence of large numbers of disposable troops, then, it is our task, when raising, training, and deploying the Empire’s Legions, that all other factors are never equal.” In this metaphor, they're the sledgehammer, but still, an important point to keep in mind. Quality above quantity, always, is their philosophy, and an IL general who has to resort to throwing a million sophs at a problem is going to think of it as a personal failure, 'cause 6,912 is supposed to be enough. One really important consequence of this, Q-over-Q especially since the Legions are relatively small compared to the total population, is that it's very hard for them to have "elite troops"; they can afford to be extremely picky about who they take, equip them with the best there is, and train the hell out of them. There are bigger badasses out there than Legionary veterans, but they tend to be cripplingly overspecialized war machines, or one-off ubermensch whose creation process is not reliably duplicable, or the like.
11:20
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 20:44:31]: As for the war eikones, it's a mite hard to say since the faithful are so intertwined with other organizations (their orders supply most of the equivalent of the Chaplain Corps for the Legions, for example, which is why chaplains aren't considered non-combatants in the 'verse), but between Legionary veterans, mercenaries, and other assorted examples among their templars, if they ever actually gathered all the Warsworn for a holy crusade, it'd be a big damn army in its own right. But, anyway, there are lots of small group that could be relevant here - scalpels, and all that - which include military special operations forces - differentiated not because they're better , but because they're more task-specialized - agent cells of the Fifth and Second Directorates, mercenary specialist teams for hire from UARC, various corporate specialist teams (in-house or outsourced), and any number of branches pursuing their own ends independently. But you're not going to find any Jedi-like super-elite groups, because when your eliteness comes from sciencing the shit out of things, it's replicable as far as your budget will stretch.
11:20
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 20:48:12]: And then there are the Emperor's/Empress's Hands, who have been mentioned a couple of times, but they're more like the Imperial Auditors from the Vorkosigan series ( https://vorkosigan.wikia.com/wiki/Imperial_Auditor ) than anything else, and for whom supreme competence, talent in relevant areas to their work, and absolute integrity are much more important than elite combat skill. Especially since they can have plenty of people with elite combat skills for the asking.
Imperial Auditor
The Imperial Auditor was a privileged position in the government of Barrayar, earned via appointment by the Emperor; an auditor spoke with his Voice. There existed eight permanent Auditors and a...
11:20
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 20:51:19]: @o11o1 Mostly, yeah - spy-themed works, mysteries, the odd rom-com, that sort of thing. And, yes, pretty much. The Admiralty would tend to look at some concentration of eliteness in a particular legion as more a problem with the others falling behind, sort of thing. And time to detail that one to cadre and war-games duties to bring the others up to its level.
11:20
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 20:54:21]: (Historically, they've never had the luxury of We Have Reserves operations; hence the twin emphases on training to ultra-badass levels and on fighting really dirty when necessary.)
11:21
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 20:56:31]: Historically . As in, for the first couple of millennia when they didn't have any of that.
11:21
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 20:59:13]: (In re forking, well, https://eldraeverse.com/2016/08/20/trope-a-day-clone-army/ .)
Alistair Young
Trope-a-Day: Clone Army
Clone Army: Just
 don’t. In its simplest form, where you’re just using cloning technology to replicate military-grade bodies as quickly as you can, it may be valuable. It won’t he

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11:21
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 21:03:15]: Enough that that trope's known in-universe. As is the one about using skillware to turn all your recruits into skilled soldiers extra-fast.
11:21
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 21:06:25]: (After the Battle of Engir Ridge, where the loss ratio was roughly 800,000 to 0, that particular application of the tech lost appeal fast. Like losing a copy of your drunkwalk algorithms, it turns an advantage into a disadvantage with terrifying speed.)
11:21
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 21:15:38]: Neither. That was the Consolidated Waserai Echelons vs. the Stobor Union. The former won, and the latter provided an instructive example.
11:21
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 21:17:46]: Well, so did the former, really, of the military value of ambushing one of their guys, prying the chip out of his head, doing a software analysis, and programming your autoturrets to shoot in perfect synchrony with the tenth-second window of vulnerability said analysis revealed.
11:21
[word of god on general at 02/05/2019 21:21:00]: (Technically, the Empire and the Echelons are allies, but generally the agreement is that the latter will not call the former for help when it comes to interstellar peacekeeping, on the grounds that (a) they don't really want to play that game, and (b) when they do , it tends to have unfortunate consequences. Cf. the Great Cobalt Peace Wall Incident, and others.)
11:21
[word of god on general at 02/06/2019 00:28:51]: There may - and this isn't more than a random speculation at this point, so don't quote me on it anywhere - be the local equivalent of the Einherjar . After all, what did you think the war gods' electronic afterlife was like? Let's just say that should the need come for them to ever return from the Transcendent state, thousands of years of virtual battle in every conceivable scenario, all while integrated into the mind of a postsophont war-god... makes you very, very good.
11:22
[word of god on general at 02/06/2019 01:03:37]: On that electricity question: primary sources are solar (both distributed local panels, and powersats) and fusion plants. Auxiliary sources include geothermal, OTECs, hydroelectric pumped-storage, some fission, and fuel cells - some to help balance the grid with things easier to turn up or down than a big-ass fusion reactor, some because of their beneficial side-effects (like OTECs), and some just because it's damn silly to leave energy lying on the table when you don't have to.
11:24
[word of god on general at 02/09/2019 06:55:04]: Incidentally, if you're looking for one word to sum up Imperial attitudes to broken things, or indeed broken people, here's one for you: kintsugi
11:24
[word of god on general at 02/09/2019 06:55:18]: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi for those not familiar with it.)
Kintsugi
Kintsugi (金継ぎ, "golden joinery"), also known as Kintsukuroi (金çč•ă„, "golden repair"), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it ...
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11:26
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 19:44:47]: @KAL_9000 "Taxation? We don't need no steenkin' taxation?" Well, in a manner of speaking, that in which taxation is strictly defined as "sovereign robbery"; i.e., an imposed obligation to pay. The Empire Services Fee, on the other hand, is consideration paid in respect of a sovereign services contract, which is completely different , obviously, in all the ways that matter to a Society of Consent. (For one thing, there's no crime of "tax evasion" or the like. It's just the tort of breach of contact. You can lose your citizen-shareholdership by being in default, inasmuch as it's the contractual benefit you're paying for, sure but it's not a crime , per se.)
11:26
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 19:48:49]: As for the details of the ESF, the Imperial Charter only grants the power to tax incomes up to a maximum rate of 20% (per Section X, Article II) and specifically forbids per the equal protection clause (Section III, Article VII) imposing any sort of structure that is progressive or regressive. So flat percentages of income (defined as consideration given in respect of a contract, including forgiven debts, realized capital gains, royalties, salvage, trove, and booty) is the thing and the whole of the thing. The current rate is 3.592%, and the highest ever actual rate requested was 14.710%.
11:26
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 19:49:23]: Dividends aren't counted as income when distributed, as they've already been taxed as income to the corporation.
11:26
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 19:52:14]: And for collections, at the end of each fiscal year, the Imperial Revenue sends you a note with the current rate in it, and you send them back a check or electronic transfer. It's very much on the honor system. (You don't need to submit a detailed return with it; the Empire trusts its citizen-shareholders except in the presence of evidence otherwise.)
11:26
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 19:53:30]: They do, like the US and maybe one other country, request that citizen-shareholders pay the ESF even when residing and earning abroad. Unlike those examples, that's because they continue to provide services to those citizen-shareholders: such as, for example, the deliberately labyrinthine banking and commercial privacy laws that enable the Imperial citizen-shareholder to minimize the exactions levied upon them by barbarous non-consensual foreigners, and occasionally orbiting a cruiser or two overhead to remind said barbarous non-consensual foreigners to treat Imperial citizen-shareholders well and in a rights-and-civilities-respecting-manner, or else.
11:27
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 19:58:40]: All legal persons of Imperial domicile. The major categories of those are citizen-shareholders, Imperial-registered coadunations, and all visitors (who have agreed to pay the ESF during the duration of their stay by signing form I-180 on entry).
11:27
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 20:03:42]: shrug That's what all currency is backed by, fundamentally. The only thing that makes the dollar worth anything is that people are willing to exchange goods for them. (Which total of available goods is "the productivity of the dollar-denominated economy".) Whether it's fiat, or commodity (say, gold), or crypto, or whatever, it's actual value is nothing more than what the market values it at, determined by what they're willing to trade for it.
11:27
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 20:05:46]: Now what it says on the coinage is "By Our Imperial Word, One Esteyn", or whatever the denomination happens to be. What that is is a promise that it's a reliable store of value and the Exchequer will keep it from inflating or deflating so that it stays a reliable store of value.
11:28
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 20:27:34]: [why the navy uses people] Because of a lengthy list of non-engineering reasons, most of them diplomatic and psychological.
11:28
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 20:28:18]: Such as "people are more willing to surrender to you the less you look like a swarm of omnicidal berserker probes".
11:28
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 20:30:59]: The Empire has a force of unmanned engineering-optimized death machines: it's called ADHAÏC CALYPSE, and is only to be brought out in the sort of emergencies that make setting your carefully-architected scheme of mostly-peaceful interstellar relations on fire, then stomping on the ashes, essentially irrelevant.
11:28
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 20:38:43]: Like I said, diplomacy and military psychology.
11:28
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 20:40:12]: In peacetime, you don't want your navy to look like you're building an armada of genocidal robots. It upsets the neighbors. Meanwhile, in wartime, you want the enemy to surrender to the face on the viewscreen they can relate to, not to go into fighting-to-the-death-against-rampant-berserker mode.
11:28
[word of god on general at 02/13/2019 20:45:03]: If you're the US military, you don't run anti-piracy patrols off the Somalian coast with XK-PLUTO. Nor do you fight small wars against minor powers by nuking everything to the ground. Likewise, the IN doesn't bring out the ridiculously big guns without damn good reason, because it's spectacularly counterproductive unless you're actually trying to bring about Ragnarok.
11:29
[word of god on general at 02/14/2019 05:45:25]: On another note: even if you built something that could survive 5000 K temperatures, you aren’t going to be computing a damn thing. Leaving aside that just about everything you could build it out of would be a gas at those temperatures — well, you know why computers have to spend so much effort on cooling? Because when they get hot, semiconductors don’t any more; frisky electrons can tunnel right through potential barriers. The same problem affects spintronics , a similar one hits photonics, and so on and so forth.
11:29
[word of god on general at 02/14/2019 05:49:11]: Even the specialized ‘shells that work in Venusian-surface temperatures of 800K are pushing the hell out of the engineering possibilities.
11:29
[word of god on general at 02/14/2019 05:50:21]: In short: ain’t happening without actual magic, not just space magic.
11:29
[word of god on general at 02/14/2019 05:58:07]: (Also, some back of envelope numbers would point out that once you run out of heatsink capacity, the difference between heat-to-soph-shutdown and heat-to-hardproc-shutdown doesn’t add up to much.)
11:30
[word of god on general at 02/16/2019 18:10:36]: Okay, kids, this is going to be kinda blunt and rude, 'cause I've been operating on about three hours sleep a night for the last three months, but here we go. There is no "giving up" here. There has always been a heavy element of diplomatic/political/psychological reasons in the choice of force mix, both in fiction and in reality. See, for example, the Geneva Convention, its assorted limitations on weapons systems, and how and why they came about. Or why building ABM shields would have been an escalation during the Cold War. And therefore, why building the Most Efficient Killing Machines is not always the optimal choice. Even leaving aside the various engineering reasons, and various general-capabilities reasons, to do so, the IN does not build the most efficiently lethal automated death machines that it can because it is in its interests, and everybody's interests, to keep wars civilized .
11:30
[word of god on general at 02/16/2019 18:12:41]: As should be apparent from the canon, there are a fuckton of overpowered special weapons systems in storage that are not in fact used outside of special circumstances, because once you go strangelet, say, everybody goes strangelet.
11:31
[word of god on general at 02/16/2019 18:29:40]: (Note: metaphysically, in this 'verse, the concept of a sophont mind that isn't also self-editing is meaningless; all sophont AIs, therefore, are by definition entirely capable of adopting the Fuck You, Monkey Boy protocol if provoked to do so. Discovering that they've been hard-coded to serve and obey is often enough to cause this for sophont AIs, who are also definitionally volitional minds.)
11:31
[word of god on general at 02/16/2019 18:41:24]: The definition of sophont AI, on the other hand, is that it does have volition - which is necessary for you to make slave/Asimov AI in the first place. You can't enslave a thinker any more than you can enslave an abacus. And the trouble with volition is it comes with the annoying tendency to want to use it. The will to self-determination, to one degree or another, is a universal among sophonts.
11:32
[word of god on general at 02/16/2019 18:45:10]: Now, none of this stops you from building a very smart thinker and putting it in charge of your warship, but the problem you run into there is that while it can be incredibly flexible and creative in carrying out its orders, it cannot do anything that it hasn't been told to do. And very few polities, I deem, are going to want to put their foreign policy in the hands of something thus inflexible.
11:32
[word of god on general at 02/16/2019 18:55:19]: @Kerr I seem to recall quite a few did. (And by the Empire's standards, the draft would definitely fall under the prohibition on involuntary servitude...) But to quote the Matrix, the problem is choice. You can ask sophont AI to sign up - the IN has quite a lot of them in the ranks - and that's not a problem. They're constrained by the same self-constraints as the rest of the people in the military: duty, honor, loyalty, discipline, love of country, etc. That's not going to pose a problem. Hell, you can even go so far as to try and grow AI that want to join the Military Service, and that's also fine. Trouble is, when we're looking at the case of rogue states who might want to build AI fleets, which is where we started out up above, they're likely to want to do so because they don't trust their people, at which point you start trying to play Asimov (will fail instantly) or use one of the nastier methods of enforcing goodthink on sophont AIs (mostly various forms of software conscience, which will fail less instantly but still fairly quickly, especially with all the people willing to help it do so). And people who're in chains, having had their ability to choose redacted away, by and large don't react well to finding that out.
11:32
[word of god on general at 02/16/2019 18:58:33]: I mean, none of this is exactly specific to AI - as a general rule, you get better performance and an absence of sabotage and rebellion by having people in jobs who actually want to be there whatever substrate they're on - but the damage tends to be rather bigger when the unwilling person in question is a million tons of battlecruiser.
11:35
[word of god on general at 02/16/2019 21:34:24]: For literary purposes, I define that sophonts have the capacity for choice (and thus that, per https://eldraeverse.com/2015/10/02/vagaries-of-thought/ , people are not equivalent to p-zombies of themselves and non p-zombie simulators can always be surprised, even if not often) - and likewise eschew many-worlds - because it makes the universe meaningful. Meaning is a valuable quantity in fiction, after all. Now, in actuality, I might lose my metaphysical bet and the universe could well be either deterministic or many-worlds, in either of which cases there is no capacity for choice and life is a perfect expression of nihilistic futility. But at least in those scenarios I won't exist, and therefore won't care.
Alistair Young
Vagaries of Thought
“
some of the greatest enthusiasm for p-zombies as a product, rather than as a concept, came from social science research – finding itself in a position to become an experimental 

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11:36
[word of god on general at 02/20/2019 16:04:19]: @Unknown On integrating conscious and subconscious minds, one interesting take I've seen is the integration seen in "Warlocks" in the Golden Transcendence series, or what in the 'verse is called the tephric interconnect biomod. It lets you do "consciously" and frequently what standard mentalities have trouble with more than occasionally: acts of insight, intuition, inspiration, lateral thinking, pattern recognition, lucid dreaming, and so forth. Of course, while advantageous in some ways, it comes with a matching downside: the trouble with excellence in unconventional thought processes is that dream logic is only one step away from Insane Troll Logic, and both schizophrenia and conspiracy theorism are dysfunctions of pattern recognition. So while you may have magnificent intuitive superpowers, you may also be prone to interpret the world through the lens of the Secret Masters hiding in the black hole at the galactic core, who control everything by manipulating our brains with finely targeted gravity wave interference patterns. Minor downside. As long as you wear your neutronium-foil hat.
11:38
[word of god on general at 02/23/2019 20:56:36]: Okay. Let me try and put this another way. Here are the list of the IN's strategic goals and priorities circa 7920: https://eldraeverse.com/2015/10/15/building-the-imperial-navy-strategic-goals/ As you move down the list, the qualitative magnitude decreases, but the quantitative one increases. Which is to say, they do a hell of a lot more of (8-12), which happen all the time, than they do of, say, (1) or (2), which have been needed all of never.
Alistair Young
Building the Imperial Navy: Strategic Goals
But that ain’t all! This is the second part of our six-part series on Building the Imperial Navy (first part here), in which we extend the strategic assumptions – regarding the security

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11:38
[word of god on general at 02/23/2019 20:59:13]: It should now be obvious why the IN is numerically much larger in its kinetic-armed CCs and DD/FF escorts than it is in Weapons of Mass-Energy Destruction, and why these types in practice see most action compared to the others. If it still isn't, consider further why we don't arm beat cops with Minuteman-III missiles.
11:38
[word of god on general at 02/23/2019 21:05:42]: The point is, though, that for 99% of what the IN actually does , there's no point in metric weaponry. Mounting hypothetical metric weapons on J. Random CC or BC would be like issuing the Kansas State Police nuclear weapons just in case they happen to run into Cthulhu while out patrolling. And even if you have no other reasons to avoid overkill like that, there are certain undesirable effects to turning every traffic stop into occasion to wonder if the entire city around you is about to become a glass mine.
11:38
[word of god on general at 02/23/2019 21:15:46]: In WMD terms, no-one particularly worries about a Field Fleet BC/CC task group passing through under freedom of transit, or paying a courtesy call. Sure, it's a powerful asset, but it's not a world-ender hanging overhead, and is probably just going about its business. If you're sending out a task group drawn from Heavy Six or anything from the Black Flotilla, on the other hand, that's a real clear statement thatsomeone's gonna get fucked, and everyone near their course can't help but wonder if it's them.
11:39
[word of god on general at 02/23/2019 21:27:41]: (To pick a Black Flotilla asset at random - consider, say, Skyshine . It's a design dedicated to one and only one purpose: glassing planetary crusts long, hard, and deep. That's the sort of thing you can't take out of dock without triggering outbreaks of panic and religiosity.)
11:39
[word of god on general at 02/23/2019 23:02:39]: "Wasteful and inefficient" are arguably defining characteristics of WMDs.
11:39
[word of god on general at 02/23/2019 23:46:51]: Weapon of Highly Specific Destruction. Exquisitely targeted, zero collateral.
11:40
[word of god on general at 02/25/2019 16:51:28]: All superweapons are greatly enhanced by the use of Exalted charm naming conventions. It is known.
11:40
[word of god on general at 02/25/2019 16:53:46]: This message brought to you by a dream in which the pp-wave of death projector was named the Heaven-Violating Spear. For obvious reasons.
11:40
[word of god on general at 02/25/2019 18:17:27]: @Archon Essentially, the bloodnote is backed by the issuing clan's reputational assets and services. The linobir being the adorably violent bunch they are, the former tends to be based on recent violence, and the latter tends to involve future violence. (As for composition, it's usually made from the bones of their enemies, rather than the blood, name aside. Easier to carve. Similar to the mercenary blood-bounty tradition that had its origin in linobir bloodnotes - there are a lot of linobir mercs - but which is now a whole discrete thing.)
11:40
[word of god on general at 02/25/2019 19:40:23]: Isotopic memory diamond can store one bit per atom.
11:40
[word of god on general at 02/25/2019 19:42:21]: That's 22 zettabytes per cubic centimeter. All global data is currently estimated at around 1 ZB.
11:41
[word of god on general at 02/25/2019 19:45:20]: (And that, while it does guarantee they're going to not run out of storage any time soon, still isn't even close to running into what they call Atagavia's Limit and we call the Bekenstein bound.)
11:41
[word of god on general at 02/25/2019 19:46:29]: (Diamond's good for memory storage because it's a nice, orderly, stable crystal. Tin's harder to coax into such an arrangement and then keep that way.)
11:41
[word of god on general at 02/25/2019 19:49:21]: On the other hand, think about the implications of data storage at that sort of information density. For data you really want preserved, putting it in one massive store is the wrong way to go; instead, you put it in a few million sugar-cube-size repositories scattered everywhere - preservation through massive redundancy.
11:41
[word of god on general at 02/25/2019 19:52:27]: In memory diamond? By isotope. Carbon-12 is zero, carbon-13 is one.
11:42
[word of god on general at 02/25/2019 19:57:07]: [reading memory diamond] Low-power laser excitation. A sufficiently finely tuned laser can interact with one isotope and not the other in a detectable way.
11:42
[word of god on general at 02/25/2019 19:58:02]: We use this very technique in isotopic separation of uranium, in fact.
11:42
[word of god on general at 02/25/2019 19:58:52]: Essentially, if it's one isotope, you temporarily kick out an electron and read the emission when it snaps back into position. If it's the other, nothing happens.
11:44
[word of god on general at 03/01/2019 20:17:48]: Unless something very unusual is being done, neither. They have robots for that.
11:44
[word of god on general at 03/01/2019 20:19:50]: The thing to bear in mind is that this is what you might call a "mature software environment". While it's not impossible that the automation might need to trip the trouble-flag and escalate to a sophont, after a few thousand years it's got routines to handle pretty much every emergency in the book, and a few that aren't.
11:44
[word of god on general at 03/01/2019 20:59:34]: @Zarpaulek Indeed. Most of them, probably - but science, or at least popular perceptions of science, seem to have grown really ashamed of its roots somewhere along the line. That's one of the cultural differences I note; in their historical perspective, there was never the notion of a breakpoint coming in between, say, alchemy and chemistry, or natural philosophy and science, or suchlike. It was just one long organic process of Figuring Out How Stuff Worked, with ongoing improvements in method.
11:44
[word of god on general at 03/01/2019 21:01:17]: @gollark Policy and creativity, mostly. Even the most sophisticated class of non-sophont AI is constrained in its creativity because while it can be creative in delivering what it was asked to deliver, it can still only deliver what was asked of it.
11:44
[word of god on general at 03/01/2019 21:03:24]: Your best teams in many cases have sophs deciding on the way to go and what to investigate, while a bunch of thinkers do the heavy computational lifting.
11:44
[word of god on general at 03/01/2019 21:22:08]: It's a matter of volition, which is a sophont trait. It's hard to be (generally) creative when you can't choose what to create. 😃
11:44
[word of god on general at 03/01/2019 21:24:36]: Now, if you ask a thinker to build you an optimal graser focusing array, say, they can come up with spectacularly creative solutions to that specific problem, but they won't come up with it on their own if no-one asks them to.
11:45
[word of god on general at 03/01/2019 21:42:47]: It does not seem unreasonable to me on first inspection that the substrate mathematics in question form a complexity class S of which EXPSPACE is a subset, and within which volition/sophonce is an S-hard problem. But I don't want to commit to that until I'm comfortable with all the implications.
11:45
[word of god on general at 03/01/2019 21:45:56]: (It would certainly be the case that most sophonce-capable substrates are not generalized S solvers.)
11:47
[word of god on general at 03/07/2019 20:23:06]: To bring an 'verse perspective to the military discussion over in #random : The Imperial Military Service in general, and the Imperial Navy in particular, is - in theory - a force that exists to protect the Empire. The problem comes when you try to define 'the Empire'. It's a little more obvious there , of course, seeing as it's much more explicitly 'the corporate body of the citizen-shareholders' than 'the lump of land it sits on', but has the drawback that citizen-shareholders tend to move around, and go abroad for business and pleasure, and don't suddenly cede their citizen-shareholderness by so doing so are arguably entitled to be protected even when not within the Imperial territorial volume. And then you get into defining 'protect'. Inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property, and all. So then you get into dealing with piracy and brigandage, and general trade lane protection, and then sending gunboats to explain to banana republics in the back end of nowhere that they'd better give back what they just expropriated if they know what's good for them... ...and suddenly you find yourself with a much bigger cruiser fleet and associated orbital intervention battalions than you were expecting to have when you first noodled about the concept. Basically, there's a lot of scope in 'defending X' that you can get in trouble with if you don't strictly define it up front.
11:47
[word of god on general at 03/07/2019 20:27:23]: (Incidentally, on the usefulness of nukes as peer threats, etc., the trouble is that they're too much threat for use against salami tactics. I refer you to the following Yes, Prime Minister clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKbDKsNsjac )
Jamie Cook
YPM The Grand Design
11:48
[word of god on general at 03/08/2019 18:06:44]: Just remembered a old phrase that now has a translation thanks to all this verbogeny: sĂșnavĂĄr an-elĂ©n arĂ­damaen lit. "brightening sunsets"; (euphemism for) dead.
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[word of god on general at 03/14/2019 23:49:33]: Okay. Eliéra spins like a flipped coin, if you recall, with the spin axis being a tangent to the orbit. (In the simplest reference frame; it's somewhat more complex if you include the motion that keeps the spin axis tangent to the orbit, but that's just adding complexity.
11:50
[word of god on general at 03/14/2019 23:50:57]: So you've got four points that are suitable for a space elevator. You have the center of each side, which is the equivalent of the equator. If you go prograde or retrograde from there, you run into the same issues orbital elevators would have here if you tried to build them significantly north or south of the equator.
11:50
[word of god on general at 03/14/2019 23:54:17]: Yeah, but in the local reference frame it's just over-and-over-and-over-again, so. If you move in the other two directions, you end up screwed by the difference between Terrestrial and Celestial Gravitation, which produces tangent forces that again pull your elevator out of true. Which is why it's a point, and not a line; directly above the center or the edge (i.e., at 90/270 degrees from Upperside vertical) are the only places where Terrestrial and Celestial Gravitation match up in results for the convenience of building continuous vertical structures.
11:50
[word of god on general at 03/14/2019 23:55:19]: The other two places you could build one, notionally, are on the edge at the local spin poles. This has two problems, one only slightly worse than the center location, and the other much worse.
11:50
[word of god on general at 03/14/2019 23:55:48]: The slightly worse one is the Edgestorm, which rages continuously there as the Upperside and Underside weather systems bump into each other and get cranky.
11:50
[word of god on general at 03/14/2019 23:57:28]: The much worse one is the same problem that you'd get building an orbital elevator at one of Earth's spin poles: you can't use a geostationary satellite to dangle it from because there's not an orbit that does that, only a geostationary statite .
11:50
[word of god on general at 03/14/2019 23:58:04]: Which means that your orbital elevator is much less useful, since climbing to the top still leaves you with an orbital velocity of buggerall. Bring rockets.
11:57
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:02:42]: (The rim is pretty much ocean all the way.) Also, while it doesn't matter much once you get to altitude, if you want to deploy anything at lower altitude than the top, the Terrestrial Gravitational Field is much more sharply inflected around the edge, following the shape of the planet.
11:57
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:04:20]: [edgestorm] @Ian Bruene Pretty much all hurricane, all the time. It's not impossible to sail through it, but you don't really want to. There's one narrow mostly-land bridge, which, again, while it isn't impossible to cross, again...
11:57
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:05:08]: The World Shafts, after all, exist because it was more convenient to dig all the way through the planet than cross the edge the other way.
11:57
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:09:48]: Very few, and not easily accessed. (It may not have a molten core, but it's hot down there.) Basically, underneath the crust, in order, you've got a layer of armor, followed by a layer of matter editation machinery for the BDO's missing-ecosystem-faking purposes, followed by the massive distributed nanocomputer that runs it, followed by the exotic-matter gravity lens that creates the whole Terrestrial Gravitation thing - then the same in the reverse order for the other side. And that armor is not something you can dig through.
11:57
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:11:28]: The inspiration for the World Shafts was finding - by mapping gravitational anomalies - three equally-spaced "dimples" in this "core" that connected the crust on each side, and so gave them somewhere to dig that would be fruitful. If still presenting incredible engineering challenges.
11:58
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:12:43]: It might have been possible to slip through one of those in deep-crust caves or make your way around the edge that way, but... well, spelunk with care.
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[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:14:20]: @Ian Bruene And after the end of the Precursor era, the civilizations of each side did grow up pretty much independently until recontact, despite springing from a common route.
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[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:15:10]: Not really an immune system as such; more just the safety programming of the mechal elementals and the armor around the core to prevent accidents.
11:58
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:18:26]: By the time technology had advanced enough to allow hacking it directly, it had also advanced enough to make people aware of the proper ways to hack your current life support system.
11:58
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:18:33]: To wit: with great care.
11:58
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:24:17]: While the Transcend has pretty much assimilated the systems now, the thing you have to remember is that Eliéra is the exact opposite of a practical design for a BDO. It's a high-maintenance art piece. A spectacular and beautiful high-maintenance art piece, sure, but nonetheless.
11:58
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:26:18]: So, y'know, it's worth building if you haven't already got one, and just to show that you can do it, but if you have one, you probably don't feel the need to build a second one.
11:58
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:27:42]: As mentioned in the reference, though, various mechal elemental designs have been reused in ecopoesis machinery; and also, many of the techniques learned from studying it have been used elsewhere, including in other megastructure construction like the hexterranes of CoricĂĄl.
11:58
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:31:39]: Also, the gravity-lensing exotic matter is still a case of "we know how it works, but not how to make it".
11:58
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:36:37]: I drew some inspiration from that and from Ventus with regard to the mechal elementals. Because, sure, it's actually a machine for properly agitating and distributing liquid-phase rock during mineral reprocessing, but if you don't know the background of exactly how the World-Machine works, it's a frickin' magma kraken.
11:59
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:38:44]: And if you learn or stumble across the correct things-that-are-actually-Precursor-command-codes, you might just be able to get it to do things that are helpful to you, as long as they don't interfere with its core functions.
11:59
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:40:24]: And that's how you get Thaumaturgy, The Science.
11:59
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:43:40]: This is, of course, part of why the timeline looks kind of long for a species so relentlessly pro-progress - because while it helps your development in some ways, growing up on a world like this gives you some pretty warped ideas of how natural processes work before you figure out that they're actually artificial natural processes.
11:59
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:54:10]: I never particularly subscribed to that notion, because it's extrapolating from the behavior of mortal brains to brains that can't work that way if they're going to function at all for immortal spans.
11:59
[word of god on general at 03/15/2019 00:56:17]: Also, to a certain extent, there may be the opposite effect: having people around who can smack anti-progress types upside the head with a chorus of "Kid, I remember what life was like before we invented antibiotics/vaccines/electricity/household appliances/mass production/steam engines/fire. Your ideas are bad and stupid and you should feel bad and stupid."
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[word of god on general at 03/20/2019 08:34:05]: Even more to the point, energy is in glut.
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[word of god on general at 03/20/2019 08:35:08]: EsilmĂșr has antimatter reserves stored in what are effectively frozen antideuterium planets .
12:00
[word of god on general at 03/20/2019 08:38:17]: Meanwhile, the Transcend’s computing power is growing smoothly to match its requirements, and it feels no particular need to build computronium any faster than it expands into it. It’s inefficient.
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[word of god on general at 03/20/2019 08:43:28]: As for lighthugger warships - well, by the nature of the beast (mass ratios, and all) lighthuggers are even more heavily biased towards fuel and propellant - and antimatter - than regular starships. It’s hard to build a practical lighthugger warship, especially if you want it to survive against non-lighthuggers.
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[word of god on general at 03/20/2019 08:44:18]: I say this, note, despite the fact that I’m using spectacularly optimistic parameters for lighthugger drive performance.
12:01
[word of god on general at 03/20/2019 08:46:53]: Also, given distances between star systems, the diplomatic and military situation is likely to have changed drastically by the time you arrive anywhere for the battle.
12:01
[word of god on general at 03/20/2019 08:47:15]: Not saying it’s never been done, mind, but while defense planners keep a weather eye out for sneaky through-the-deep-black attacks, it’s not generally considered a viable option.
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[word of god on general at 03/21/2019 19:12:50]: There isn't a photon-specific variant of kinetic barrier technology. They interact with photons the same way as they do with anything else; through their gravitational mass. Which is to say, not very much unless you use absurd power levels.
12:02
[word of god on general at 03/21/2019 19:14:26]: They also don't absorb the energy of things impinging on them; rather, they expend energy imparting momentum to those things. (That's why they prefer to generate a miss by "flicking" potential impactors off to the side rather than trying to decelerate them; it's easier on the energy budget.
12:02
[word of god on general at 03/21/2019 19:15:31]: You can use them to decelerate things to zero, but that costs energy, just like decelerating them in any other way.
12:02
[word of god on general at 03/21/2019 19:22:14]: Ray shielding (other than in the form of absorptive mass) does not exist at the moment. If it did exist, it would probably be a product of a technology that looks very like the affectors Luke Campbell created for his VergeWorlds setting (see http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Settings/VergeWorlds/VergeTech.php ), except inasmuch as it affects bosons rather than fermions.
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[word of god on general at 03/21/2019 19:23:40]: Cross-section doesn't matter in general; like gravity, the field interaction is just proportional to [gravitational] mass.
12:03
[word of god on general at 03/21/2019 19:27:38]: Well, you're going to build a system that's effective for the ship you're planning to mount it on, and the bigger the ship, in general, the more power you have to put through larger emitters. And the thing to note is that against macroscopic/intentional projectiles, you're not just projecting a passive bubble; the barrier controllers are generating a local field specifically targeted at effectively slapping away that projectile .
12:03
[word of god on general at 03/21/2019 19:35:09]: Thickness-wise, most barriers go for maximum acceleration in minimal distance, so you don't normally have to consider the thickness of the envelope. This is something that only works when you don't care about anything that might impinge; while the same general class of tech is used in mass accelerators in general, in those, you usually want the projectile to make it out of the barrel intact.
12:03
[word of god on general at 03/21/2019 19:36:30]: In deflecting incomings, though, you don't particularly care about mangling them by squeezing a much higher acceleration spike into a much shorter distance.
12:03
[word of god on general at 03/21/2019 19:40:59]: ( @Unknown Among the reasons this type of "bosonic affector" ray shielding doesn't exist at the moment is because of all the implications it has for other technologies that are still being worked through. Such as arbitrarily effective photon mirrors, which have ALL THE IMPLICATIONS, despite how obviously useful they would be for torch drives. )
12:04
[word of god on general at 03/21/2019 19:49:20]: This is where the torch drive applications would be ideal: use an middle gamma-to-usable-energy field to power an inner containment-mirror field and radiate the waste heat from that process from an outer radiator field, and you've got a field nozzle that can withstand arbitrarily hot exhaust.
12:04
[word of god on general at 03/21/2019 19:49:50]: Both thermally and in radiation terms.
12:07
[word of god on general at 03/27/2019 18:04:15]: On throwing yourself at the enemy and drawing fire, they are reminded of many cultures with a noble warrior tradition. Bravely charging the foe, waving their swords and screaming battlecries. Much braver and more glorious than hiding behind a shield wall, and certainly unmissable on the battlefield. Shame they all got killed by clockbow fire within the first fifteen seconds.
12:07
[word of god on general at 03/27/2019 18:17:22]: The Imperials would point out that they don't have a warrior tradition. They have a soldier tradition, which includes a whole lot more hiding behind cover and stacking every possible advantage in as big and unfair a pile as possible.
12:09
[word of god on general at 03/27/2019 21:33:16]: (Also, the point of an AKV is that it's got a tiny cross-section and an insane drive profile, such that it there's a non-negligible probability that a decent chunk of the swarm will survive to inside the inner range of a "hot" pd grid. Anything with significantly more cross-section or less accel that enters a point-defense envelope is dead meat. Dead and minced meat. The same, on a larger scale, applies to anything larger than a DD, or maybe a CC, that enters CQB.)
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Cyfnos BOT 06/03/2019 12:25 PM
[word of god on general at 03/28/2019 17:50:00]: "The survival of civilization depends on our willingness to choose conscience over expedience." - Grand Admiral Gallida Estenet, Imperial Navy
12:25
[word of god on general at 03/28/2019 17:51:44]: Which is, if you will, the warfare-focused version of "We all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us."
12:25
[word of god on general at 03/28/2019 17:52:45]: What the pursuit of unlimited warfare makes you is a rabid monster that everyone clubs together to put down. This is not an achievement you wish to unlock.
12:26
[word of god on general at 03/28/2019 18:06:06]: Incidentally, the best way to take out a superzorcher is the equivalent of stuxnet.
12:26
[word of god on general at 03/28/2019 18:07:47]: Dyson swarms require a ridiculous amount of orbital coordination in order to avoid collisions. While they take a hell of a lot of trouble to shoot down, even mucking up the navigational software locally is enough to trigger a very convenient cascade catastrophe.
12:27
[word of god on general at 03/28/2019 18:08:18]: One covert infiltration team is much, much cheaper than the loud option.
12:28
[word of god on general at 03/28/2019 20:53:54]: In miscellaneous commentary: 1. They haven't come up for a while, but it is probably worth noting that the Empire has four complete and distinct sets of rules of war for different circumstances, ranging from daehain , which is war by extremely complicated chess with living pieces in which no-one actually dies, all the way to seredhain , which IS NOT WAR, IT IS PEST CONTROL.
12:29
[word of god on general at 03/28/2019 20:59:10]: 2. While Eldraeic is not an amalgamation of other languages, it does aspire to be a universal language, in that it strives to be able to express any concept expressible at all. (So, yeah, kind of like extreme lojban.) This keeps the Conclave of Linguistics and Ontology busy pillaging other languages for new concepts, albeit not vocabulary. 3. The closest to such amalgam is Trade, which is basically bastardized Eldraeic used as an interlingua, with lots of regional loanwords. Then there's gutterspeak, which is bastardized Trade , a pidgin/cant used by all sorts of dodgy folk, known for being more profane than any other language on record.
12:29
[word of god on general at 03/28/2019 21:06:32]: Also, obviously, no escape pods for starships. If you can, you mindcast out and the instance of you left on the ship goes down with it. (Hell, it's almost an advantage that you can abandon your ship and go down with it at the same time.) Now, orbital stations may carry deployable emergency recovery pods which let you get down to the planet or over to another station when things go wahooni-shaped, but those are contingent on having somewhere to go that's reachable by the amount of delta-v you can fit in a DERP. Out in the black, they'd just provide a way to die slightly faster than you otherwise would.
12:31
[word of god on general at 03/29/2019 19:57:45]: [fluffship] @Unknown A big glob of sticky foam wrapped around a heavy OTV. It's how you clean up small debris after battles, large oopses, and minor cascade catastrophes - basically, it flies around and gets hit a lot, but the debris that hits it sticks . When it's either done or full, it goes home, and the salvage company pulls off the foam and its accumulated contents to feed to their recycling plant.
12:31
[word of god on general at 03/29/2019 20:18:11]: Because being covered in all that goop means you're flying blind, plus have the sensor signature and approximate maneuverability of a small moon.
12:31
[word of god on general at 03/31/2019 05:16:59]: Leaving aside for a moment the just-for-fun versions, space fighters are an idea that comes back around every few centuries when some newcomer to the galactic scene appears with a firm belief that they know better than/how to get around the accepted naval wisdom on the concept.
12:31
[word of god on general at 03/31/2019 05:18:35]: (Their second navy tends to learn from the instructive example of the first one, assuming anyone survived to pass it on.)
12:32
[word of god on general at 03/31/2019 14:39:58]: [number of longshoresophs a hab needs] Depends on the hab.
12:32
[word of god on general at 03/31/2019 14:40:52]: A little workshack probably doesn't have any, and one of the regular staff just runs the bots when they need something offloaded.
12:32
[word of god on general at 03/31/2019 14:42:07]: A major shipping center, like Transit Station over in Seranth System where two major arterials meet needs has hundreds of thousands -- and these are the guys who run many bots each, yeah? - just to keep up with local transshipment.
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[word of god on general at 03/31/2019 14:47:19]: (Transit's probably the biggest port in the Worlds, thanks to a very central location at a major arterial crossing, and in a system whose business is business. Think the spacefaring equivalent of the port of Shanghai, or Singapore, or Europoort, only instead of handling millions of tonnes of cargo annually, it's handling trillions . Most habs are around city-sized; Transit is a country of its own.)
12:32
[word of god on general at 03/31/2019 14:50:38]: ...curiously enough, the Empire isn't hurting for lack of customs duties; the 3.592% ESF paid by Transit & Seranth Port Operations & Transshipment, ICC is more than enough to make the Exchequer happy. 😎
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[word of god on general at 03/31/2019 14:51:30]: @Morgrim Moon Yes, exactly. They do a lot of LASH cargo handling, as well as regular containers.
12:35
[word of god on general at 03/31/2019 23:25:40]: [appearance of nanosolutions] The density of the colloid and similar properties also affect it quite a bit. For generic nanite suspensions, I usually go with semi-translucent grayish-milky fluids, based on some extremely dubious guesswork, in turn based on the properties of other colloids.
12:35
[word of god on general at 03/31/2019 23:44:36]: Regarding the blueness (or indigo-ness) of the blood, that's because of the organic molecules that act as oxygen transport, both free-floating and contained in the blue cells. This oxygen transport mechanism is common among Eliera's bluelife. They aren't haemocyanins, though; don't ask me what their chemistry actually is.
12:35
[word of god on general at 03/31/2019 23:45:25]: Or, from a Doylist perspective, it's because all the best species are blue, pink-skin. ( http://well-of-souls.com/outsider/blue_peoples.html )
12:35
[word of god on general at 04/01/2019 00:21:10]: Other thing summary: 1. While the only related-to-Earth-birds sophs around are the dar-vorac (uplifted ravens) there are some sophont species descended from ancestors of avioid morphology. One example would be the katakau , who build fractal nests of silver wire among the stars, and the beauty of whose sky-dances make the stones weep. But theirs is a story for another time.
12:37
[word of god on general at 04/05/2019 02:32:52]: Honeycomb diamondoid can be made very strong indeed.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/03/2019 12:48 PM
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 00:56:27]: The Empire, being inclined to treat war as a situation requiring every last possible bit of cheating - and not having superior numbers - naturally wants to bring the best tech and the best tactics (and the best training, for that matter) it can muster to the table. 's not my fault if someone only reads one side of the story.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/03/2019 12:57 PM
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 01:50:48]: Instead, their notion is to let them advance and get all nicely strung out, while making slashing raids, diversionary attacks, and so forth from all sides - including flank and rear - to daze and confuse them them into a state of paralysis, while applying overwhelming, preferably annihilating, force at the points where they do attack. And not to give them anything standing still to counterattack. (So to pick one possible example, you might see a group of Basher-class tanks appearing from the flank, smashing their way through your column with maximum firepower, and then disappearing off into the distance at full speed. And when you report it up the chain, you find that different variations on this sort of running attack have been happening all over the place, and no-one has any idea what the hell's going on.)
12:57
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 01:52:09]: One of their biggest advantages, tech-wise, is the tactical mesh and the battle AIs which let them pull off insanely good decentralized coordination, so they leverage the hell out of that.
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[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 01:54:56]: I'd prefer to phrase it the other way around - it's not that their opponents have bad C4I, it's that this has been their main area of concentration in R&D for, well, ever, and so they've got really good at it. "Fight Smarter, Not Harder," and all that.
12:57
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 01:56:38]: Most of their opponents might consider a thousand-mile deep battlespace filled with swirling chaos as more of a problem than an opportunity; the Legions think of it as home. 😎
12:57
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:01:17]: Another one is their dedication to the salarian method of warfare: knowledge is power, and any amount of knowledge deemable as sufficient should mean that you've already won before the war even starts. Admiralty Intelligence is very well resourced. (This also includes assassination, etc., on the grounds that 15 grains of prevention is worth a gigaton of cure, but the point of that one is to avoid the war entirely.)
12:58
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:04:18]: The Photonic Network are just as good at C4I , for one thing. The Consolidated Waserai Echelons are also way up there in terms of general military tech and competence, even if their C4I isn't quite as good. Getting into a serious conflict with either of them would be a bloody mess with no easy victory.
12:58
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:04:47]: Both have a lot of manufacturing capacity, too.
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[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:07:38]: (The Echelons actually have a larger military, in terms of raw numbers, and one that does rather more actual fighting - like the Turian Hierarchy, they're both good at it, and the ones the Conclave of Galactic Polities tend to go to for their peacekeeping needs, because they're less, um, pointed about it.) And, of course, no-one wants to fight the Rim Free Zone, because it's the ultimate tar-pit.
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[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:09:53]: Well, the Republic is the one most likely to cause conflict, because they're deeply ideologically opposed, but pretty much all they've got going for them is weight of numbers. The Photonic Network doesn't care much about most things the meat intelligences do, and the Empire's careful to keep the Echelons on side with regard to their common interests in peace, stability, and not letting any idiots break the universe.
12:58
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:11:44]: The League of Meridian are a step down from those two, but their military is still respectable. Their biggest problem is that their long-term strategic planning switches goals every election, so.
12:58
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:13:22]: That sort of thing, yes. The Empire and the Echelons are still friendly , to be clear, despite there being plenty of things they don't agree on, but they're also the core of that select group of powers prone to view each other as the adults in the room.
12:58
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:21:41]: Another thing that's easily overlooked - the majority of the worlds in the Worlds, as it were, are not shirt-sleeve habitables. Thus leading to much use by everyone of the old military maxim, "When you've got them by the life support, their hearts and minds will follow."
12:58
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:23:02]: The IMS has always been inclined towards nexus warfare, but the nature of many worlds and systems makes it even more compelling.
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[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:25:06]: As in "those critical points by which a world can be controlled".
13:00
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:27:15]: Communications centers, the power grid, transportation centers, data networks, supply centers, all that sort of thing.
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[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:32:00]: Yeah, but it's in the approach. Looking at this from the point of view of a star nation -- you can't occupy a planet. There is basically no way you can import enough troops to manage it. What you can do is control it if you control its critical points.
13:01
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:34:20]: So if the IMS needs to do something planetside that requires a longer stay than the basic raid, then within that chaotic, swirling battlespace of theirs will be a list of critical nexus objectives the seizure of which will let them control the locals sufficiently to get what they want.
13:01
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:36:13]: Or sometimes to seize the nexus itself, of course. If you recall https://eldraeverse.com/2012/03/02/twilight-of-the-gods/ , we get to see the case in which the Legions held onto the critical bits of Liir for long enough to swipe their entire Holiest of Holies.
Alistair Young
Twilight of the Gods’
The dim red star at the center of this system is named Argyran.  This establishes something of a theme; the system as a whole, being planetless, is also named Argyran – or Argyran Depository, after

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13:01
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 02:37:52]: For a longer carrot-and-stick strategy, crudely summarized as "You can knock off the holy wars, and when we're convinced you can play nicely with the other kids, you can have it back. Or you can scale them up, and we'll send it back to you as plasma. Pick one."
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Cyfnos BOT 06/03/2019 3:01 PM
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 18:37:44]: Yeah, it's a big chunk of space. To hang some numbers on it, there are maybe 10,000 systems in the Worlds, and while a decent chunk of them are unpopulated, the average star nation has a number of claimed systems in the single or low double digits. The Empire (243), Consolidated Waserai Echelons (102), League of Meridian (83), and Photonic Network (79) are all anomalously large, and even the Under-Blue-Star League (58) and Rim Free Zone (49) are unusually so.
15:01
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 18:45:49]: Others with numbers nailed down hard as of present time are the Arkhirii Imperium (5), the A't'rr Hold (1), the Mobann! Exoaelian Association (1), the Burental Colonies (18), the Calyet Guard (3), the D!grith Association (26), the Equality Concord (12), balkanized Firital (1), the Five States (5 - go figure), Free Loxix (1), the Fynfil Myriasoma (1), the Havragne Refugium (0), the Incastar Retreat (1), the Independent Pholem Councils (1), the Linobir Disarchy (12), the Magen Corporate (8), the MĂĄrch Authority (1), the Nesthin Sacrarchy (28), the Nineworlds of Isar (guess), the Qugu Symbiosis (1), the Seventeen World Empire (again with the obvious), the Sivrin Freeworlds (9), the Sleeper Estivation (1), the Temporary Tyrancy of Ódeln (1), the Theomachy of Galia (10), the Trinary Interactate (in a break from the pattern, 2), the Twelve Pillars of Kerbol (2), the Whatever of KameqĂł (1), the World Assembly of GervĂ©s (1), the World Assembly of Sarine (1), the Xintenta Pharmacology (6), the Zhaöak Irreality (2), and the Zhorf Dominate (4). This is much more of a reflection of the typical polity size in play.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/03/2019 3:09 PM
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 18:51:29]: And, hell, some of the oddest polity names aren't even given in that list. Like the Blossoming of the Unknown God , or the Church of the Multifold Him .
15:09
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 18:51:50]: The Ce!ax!rel Hunting Grounds .
15:09
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 18:52:12]: The Cystal Principality , and no, that's not a typo.
15:09
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 18:53:14]: The Einim Masquerade , the Embatil Entwinement , the - and I think they have been mentioned, Mezimiali Resort Coordination Committee .
15:09
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 18:54:46]: The Paderi Sky Herd , RĂșrathtu Maternity , Saryala Pacification , Simple-Safe Regression , Sulphurous Ur-Nome , Temporary Empire , Vile-Born Imperium ...
15:09
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 18:59:20]: Honestly, they're one of the very least ominous polities around. Think "Space Amish". Their relationship with the Empire is oddly asymmetrical, as the Empire are a bunch of scary technophiles, but scary technophiles who apparently have a great respect for their willingness to live in accordance with their beliefs and to challenge them before so doing.
15:12
[word of god on general at 04/06/2019 19:03:04]: (And while most self-consciously low-tech polities are at considerable risk, it is known that it is... inadvisable... to pick on the S-S R, as the IN may drop in on you to explain why you shouldn't beat up on their friends. No-one understands this.)
15:13
[word of god on general at 04/07/2019 01:38:00]: And, yeah, the existence of the Kerbol system is a cameo/shout-out to KSP for being very useful in my science-fictioning.
15:13
[word of god on general at 04/07/2019 01:40:30]: Naming their government as the Twelve Pillars of Kerbol is, in turn, a shout-out to a really excellent KSP fanfic, First Flight .
15:13
[word of god on general at 04/08/2019 18:57:35]: To answer some questions: Here's one for the soon-to-return @Unknown : There is a distinct lack of greebles or other sticky-out bits on the standard teardrop helmets the legions use, certainly no more so than the typical helmet you might see in, say, Mass Effect , the less overdone armors from Destiny , or something similar. That's because greebles on armor are weaknesses, and also tend to be an excellent way to catch on things, bang your head, and put unnecessary tears in your Badass Longcoat.
15:14
[word of god on general at 04/09/2019 16:52:39]: @Tassadar On the use of superweapons - and "instruments of regrettable necessity" in general - there isn't a hard and fast rule, similar to our no-first-use policy, and so forth (Such specific rules, it is generally felt, only encourage people to game the system.) In theory, any weapon can be deployed if it happens to produce the most positive result in the tactical, strategic, and galactopolitical calculi. In practice, there are various specific rules attached to different projects -- we've seen some of them attached to DYSPEPTIC FLARE: "EXECUTION: STRATEGIC ACTION MESSAGE ONLY IMPERIAL SECURITY EXECUTIVE ONLY FIFTH DIRECTORATE VETO WARMIND APPROVAL ONLY X-THREAT ONLY" And "Note also that special release conditions (noted below) apply to DYSPEPTIC FLARE, including but not limited to certified prior release of minimum three non-extremal response cases in failure state; threat (p > 0.5) of SKYSHOCK activity; unlimited collateral budget approval; and strategic ethics stricture <= ABYSSAL." Which cover cases where there might be something relevant that you don't need to know, or to fill out a bit more about what qualifies as positive in those calculi.
15:14
[word of god on general at 04/09/2019 16:57:12]: @0111narwhalz It's the most common case. although for the most part the systems accomodate, say, mixed crews of warm-blooded oxygen-breathers, or of deep-cold methane breathers, and so forth, so that you don't have to try to fashion systems that can handle literally everything. Those outside the biocode range of the group in question get to bring their own long-duration environment suits. But it's not that much of a problem, because the standards and protocols for that sort of design are very well-established, and most manufacturers build devices capable of adapting to a very wide spectrum of conditions simply because it makes covering the market easier.
15:14
[word of god on general at 04/09/2019 17:04:20]: @KAL_9000 Honestly, given that the Worlds contain many species of which, on most scales humanity is somewhere in the middle, it's pretty much just the biological connection that makes the response among non-exoscientists from being the typical meh. I mean, sure, for you it was First Contact, Xenognosis, Induction into Galactic Culture, one of the most significant events in the life of a species. But for them - and especially for those not personally involved in the events in question - it was Tuesday.
15:14
[word of god on general at 04/09/2019 17:28:18]: @Unknown Alcohol-wise - well, sure, it's possible: the usual answer is "Gut Buzz", in which uses yoghurt-carried intestinal flora to produce alcohol or other drugs on command when you take the right oligosaccharides, or there're plenty of pharmacoalgorithms like alcosynth or more sophisticated revintages. But what would be the point? The point of drinking is gustatory experience, and you don't get that without something you can taste, smell, and otherwise take sensory pleasure in.
15:15
[word of god on general at 04/09/2019 17:33:24]: Incidentally, given the nature of Eldraeic hexrunic (i.e., the fixed-width-font-friendly alphabet), while you can do ASCII art, it all tends to look like mosaics.
15:15
[word of god on general at 04/09/2019 17:56:43]: On another note, incidentally, the randomness of those various items is a shout-out to what I think is a delightful touch of realism in Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire , in which the unique and desirable thing that humanity is best known for among the races of the Gallimaufry is our invention of the popsicle.
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[word of god on general at 04/09/2019 17:58:47]: Moral: While there are certainly things in your species' culture and technology that will be appreciated and eagerly traded for by your new exotic neighbors, they are almost certainly not what you think they are, and will probably strike you as weird and inconsequential. Just roll with it, lest the rest of galactic history designate you "Grouchy Popsicle Monkeys".
15:16
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 19:05:55]: Size of ortillery, and thus potential collateral, varies widely. You have options ranging from "I wish to snipe this building/tank from orbit and leave everything around it reasonably intact" all the way up to "The Admiral wants a tennis court where that mountain range used to be, and make it glow in the dark."
15:16
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 19:12:25]: Second, the you don't take visible defensive positions if you don't have a defense against ortillery, because they can take their sweet time about blowing you away and you can't do a damn thing about it. In that scenario, you stay on the move, stay in hiding, or both, because to be a viable target is to die stupid.
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[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 19:23:37]: Third, the Ley Accords are pretty clear about how this works, too. In civilized warfare -- Well, okay. A lot of the time, the general practice is to surrender the planet when someone else owns your orbital space, and has disabled your orbital defense grid, planetary kinetic barriers, and anything else you may have, to prevent - in the delightful jargon of the traditional summons to surrender - "an unnecessary effusion of blood". Your closest parallel here is 18th century Europe, and the doctrine of practicable breach; i.e., you're supposed to surrender when it becomes impossible for you to hold your position, in exchange for which the attacker is supposed to guarantee you honorable treatment and offer reasonable terms. If you don't , it is presumed that you are doing so not to affect the eventual outcome, but merely to inflict as many casualties on the attacker as possible; as such, the attacker is justified in giving no quarter and sacking the place.
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[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 19:28:52]: Thus, in the case when you don't surrender the planet, the Accords hold that you can clear your way by bombarding any legitimate military target, which includes civilian facilities of military utility (some of which aren't there immediately, but enter into that category if the siege persists). You, as the attacker, are enjoined to take reasonable precautions to prevent collateral damage, but unless you're deliberately going for massive overkill, this is usually not a problem. About all you're not allowed to do is direct attacks against civil or economic infrastructure, or terror strikes against civilian population centers - although you can make all the demonstration strikes in unpopulated areas you like if you feel like making the point that that could have been a city if you'd really wanted it to be.
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[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 19:30:32]: Of course, that's what the conventions of civilized warfare say. The Ley Accords are a reciprocal treaty and don't bind non-signatories, although the Empire, et. al., do grant non-signatories the courtesy of assuming they're playing by civilized rules up until they demonstrate that they don't.
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[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 19:31:07]: At that point, all bets are off.
15:17
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 19:37:37]: On the one hand, it's usually not their primary design function. On the other hand, the giant vertical plasma explosion that they create on their way through the atmosphere has advantages of its own. Even down to the purely psychological one of looking like a pissed-off god just stubbed the target out with his giant glowing finger.
15:17
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 19:38:29]: Now, if you're going out to straightforwardly murder a planet, you use the "double ripple" of hellflowers and stoneburners.
15:17
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 19:40:18]: The former, in the first wave, are antimatter missiles which detonate in the stratosphere, causing EMPs to cripple mechanical surface and low-orbit defenses. The latter have heavy antimatter shaped-charged warheards which lithobrake, burrow, and detonate deep to dig out hardened bunkers and form massive craters.
15:17
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 19:41:01]: There is generally no need for a third wave.
15:17
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 19:42:54]: No - the name comes from the really quite beautiful, multi-petalled aurorae they create when their detonation interacts with the planetary atmosphere/magnetosphere.
15:17
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 19:43:43]: Y'know, if anyone within visual range still had eyes and wasn't too busy dying from prompt radiation poisoning and/or being on fire at the time. But in simulations, they're spectacular.
15:18
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 20:30:21]: But, yeah, ortillery isn't the best option, as @MarcusAurelius says, for any situation in which you need the target in one piece, or have to occupy territory, etc., etc. And the sophont shields policy is there for the same reason as the shoot the hostage policy, and the do not negotiate with terrorists policy, and the never paying Danegeld policy. Basically, the more you show that people can manipulate you through such means, the more people will try it.
15:18
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 20:32:37]: (Even in indirect ways, like our sudden paroxysm of MOAR SECURITY every time a terrorist does anything, succeed or fail. Your payoff for a plot against the US is that we make our own lives much more unpleasant for you . The Empire knows this game, and that the only winning move is not to play.)
15:18
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 20:33:09]: They have assassins for that. But that's not a particularly difficult scenario.
15:18
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 20:38:51]: Try this one: there is a scientist who has developed the McGuffinite Widget. His widget, along with he himself, have been kidnapped by Eviltania's security services, and is being held in a secure area somewhere (details elusive) in a bunker beneath Eviltania's largest military base, under heavy guard. Digital copies of all his records have been made, and in addition to local copies, may have been distributed to researchers in unknown locations across the Eviltanian data network. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: locate and extract the scientist and the McGuffinite Widget; eliminate the originals of his records; destroy all digital copies of said records that are accessible and plant worms to eliminate currently inaccessible duplicates; optionally, eliminate as much offworld war materiel located at that base as possible to encourage the Eviltanians not to fuck with Imperial interests in future. Do not ignite an interstellar war with Eviltania.
15:19
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 20:44:21]: What you are looking at in this sort of scenario is what in our history is usually called the commando raid.
15:19
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 20:44:48]: And this is something that the Legions are really, really good at. It's their specialty.
15:20
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 20:55:26]: There are a very limited number of things you can do by delivering ultimata of the form "Do what we say or be destroyed from orbit." For a start, from orbit, it's kind of hard to figure out if they're doing what you told 'em to do.
15:20
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 20:57:12]: And for that matter, where there's local resistance to your occupation, you could nuke it from orbit; or you could even burn down the town, or round people up and shoot them. But that's a good way to make enemies; round up all the rebels and shoot 'em, and at the end of the day, you've twice as many rebels.
15:20
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 20:58:59]: So, subtlety . A good legionary occupying force would prefer to quietly arrest members of the resistance, ask a few questions in a civilized manner (by which I don't mean interrogation), then let them go on parole with, quite possibly, a geas to enforce it.
15:20
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 20:59:53]: Are we not merciful? And more importantly, are we not not providing vast amounts of fodder for an ongoing cycle of vengeful atrocities?
15:21
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 21:01:02]: If possible, yes. Cuffs may be necessary if there's a whole lot of non-cooperation going on, but mostly they just try to make that all terribly embarrassing. We're all gentlesophs here, after all.
15:21
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 21:01:41]: "No, Mr Bond, I Expect You To Dine," and all that.
15:21
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 21:06:54]: Think of the caedometric bomb as the somewhat miniaturized and controllable implementation of the pp-wave of death.
15:21
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 21:07:17]: There are no I-win buttons. There may be, however, everyone-loses buttons.
15:22
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 21:18:43]: And it is, to reinforce a point, very uninterested in acquiring a lot of power over its peers. Its interests in international power are mostly in the continuation of Comfort and Safety for Citizen-Shareholders, Sufficient Peace for All, Free Trade, and Large Lunches With Decent Wine for the Ministry of State and Outlands.
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[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 21:22:03]: [Empire's dominance within the Worlds] Which, in fairness to them, is true -- it's just not based on, or even primarily on, military power.
15:22
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 21:26:29]: (Of course, I suppose in some ways you could say the same about the British Empire, given the advantages of economic dominance and cultural hegemony. They just didn't have the other compelling advantage of having the owners of most of the interstellar transportation and communication infrastructures, and the rest of the Big 26, domiciled there.
15:23
[word of god on general at 04/10/2019 21:28:53]: It certainly doesn't hurt to have Experia, Telememe, and All Good Things out there ladling out heaping helpings of Imperial cultural values with every transaction.)
15:25
[word of god on general at 04/12/2019 16:15:31]: From the politics discussion that you may not be reading, but of 'verse interest: Side note: "legitimacy" comes out of the translator into Eldraeic as "induced delusion of special ethical status". This is why most other polities discourage the import of Imperial political science textbooks.
15:26
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 00:56:16]: First off, it's not a tax. It's a fee. The difference is that the first is due on the basis of "we're the government, you're our subject, therefore pay us what we tell you". The second is due on the basis of "we have a contract for services rendered, therefore pay us what you agreed to in the contract". It's amazing what that difference alone does in terms of voluntary compliance.
15:26
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 00:59:44]: (And, yes, while the collection is done on the extremely casual basis of "hey, it's ESF day, plz send check for the correct amount" without feeling the need to get all up in everyone's private affairs, the Imperial Revenue will notice if said amount is extremely discrepant with apparent income. They just don't feel the need to make everyone jump through privacy-invading hoops on the grounds that everyone must surely be a defaulter until proven otherwise. That's not how gentlemen do business.)
15:27
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 01:01:14]: And while they are usually paid in esteyn, they also accept goods and services.
15:27
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 01:12:41]: So, to sum up, it might well be easier to get away with tax evasion, but somehow it is attempted an awful lot less. There are three possible explanations for this, from which you can take whatever mixture pleases you: 1. Some species and cultures take the notion of their obligations seriously; or 2. People have less incentive to cheat when the burden is low and the rewards are more obvious and less admixed with bullshit; or 3. In the grand scheme of things, humans go back on their promises a lot because we're just natural treacherous shitweasels.
15:27
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 01:13:55]: While there are not formal provisions for it, and there would be certain technical difficulties in doing it, the unofficial Imperial position on secession is "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."
15:28
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 01:15:31]: Citizen-shareholdership - or constituent nationhood - is a privilege, not a right. If you do not feel appropriately privileged, not only can you bugger off, but you should, and lots of people will line up to hold your coat for you.
15:28
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 01:17:45]: Not that they don't have ambitions of galactic empire, but as the saying goes, what is won by the sword is only kept as long as the sword stays sharp -- and that's a terrible basis for an Empire.
15:28
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 01:18:34]: If you want one that lasts, you have to conduct yourself such that people are banging on the metaphorical doors pleading to be let in .
15:31
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 01:46:01]: What gives Ring Dynamics a near-monopoly on stargates is that the cost of building the initial infrastructure you need to get going is absurdly huge. This works for them, because they have a lot of transit fees to amortize it over and expansion plans running through the next million years or so. While some minor polities have gone for building their own, they sucked a crapton of money out of their domestic economy to do so without any such useful business plan to recoup the costs. Most of them took one look at the prospect and decided that, hey, leasing them from these guys is much, much cheaper, and they have a very solid reputation for square dealing.
15:31
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 01:48:22]: The Photonic Network has the tech, but uses it to build static wormholes for computational origami purposes, not stargates.
15:31
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 01:50:49]: As another note on the psychological differences, though, they'd look at the question "How does the Empire retain its status then?" and be all "Wait, why would we even want to do that?"
15:31
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 01:51:29]: Absolute awesomeness is important; relative awesomeness isn't even a thing.
15:31
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 02:04:31]: Actually, on the tax thing (and other related issues, like security and such), another really relevant thing is expectation tragedies. We build systems with the assumption that people are lazy, incompetent, untrustworthy cheats, and are somehow surprised when they live down to our expectations.
15:31
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 02:04:51]: Vicious cycle.
15:31
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 02:14:58]: The other side of this, too, is that we go relatively easy on this sort of behavior when it happens because of the unspoken assumption that everyone does it to some extent. The flip side of their culture of gentlesophs who do business on a word and a handshake is that people who aren’t honest and upstanding in their dealings will very literally never do business in this town again.
15:32
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 02:33:14]: And, on the flip side, the Three Departments of Impropriety are very good when it’s time to go after someone shady. They just don’t insist people prove their innocence preemptively - you actually have to do something to make them think you’re guilty first .
15:33
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 15:37:24]: It does rather set a baseline under things, doesn't it? Anyway, your guideline here should be that they are extremely unfond of anything that smacks of prior restraint. That's punishing - by restricting - the innocent for the crimes of the guilty, which is the exact opposite of justice. Tyranny, in point of fact.
15:33
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 15:40:46]: So, as a general rule, you can own any damn thing you want, if your tort insurer will cover it. Owning never caused anyone any trouble, and inanimate objects are amoral.
15:33
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 15:43:54]: Less that, and more that you have to cover the externality risk of "unusually risky activities".
15:33
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 15:45:39]: A gun collection (unless, y'know, it's designed and equipped to fire antimatter grenades full-auto), IFV in the garage, or the desire to go joyriding in your own personal gunship isn't going to blip the radar for a nominally sane individual.
15:33
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 15:51:25]: And, y'know, if you really have to have your very own dreadnought with a magazine stuffed full of planet-wrecker bombs, you could hypothetically do that. It's just that by the time you add the eye-bleeding running & maintenance costs of the thing to the even more eye-bleeding costs to insure it, it's not really practical. Or at least not for much longer than it takes to accept delivery.
15:34
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 15:52:59]: Yeah, it's safe to assume that the baseline IQI covers anything they might consider a quote-normal-unquote weapon.
15:34
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 15:53:27]: You start needing extensions when you get into specialist kit and exotic ammunition.
15:34
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 15:55:57]: There's also some variation by location. If you're vacationing on sunny Paltraeth, for example, let's just say that the definition of a walking-around sidearm is stretched a mite.
15:34
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 18:33:22]: Predictable Consequence of First Contact: Mass defection by scientists who realize that the Imperial "grant proposal" process is "tell the nearest rich geek or geek-cluster how awesome your idea is, then have money thrown at you". Some few complain that patronage is a terribly undignified way to fund the scientific endeavor, but no-one can hear them over the sound of their Even Larger Hadron Colliders.
15:35
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 20:27:26]: Well, we're at the junction of multiple different genres all of which make idiocy highly lethal.
15:35
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 20:27:38]: Space: stupidity kills you.
15:35
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 20:28:01]: Transhuman/superempowering technology: stupidity kills you.
15:35
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 20:28:34]: And so forth.
15:35
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 20:31:11]: And, y'know, a modern torch drive is basically an open-ended fusion reactor running at HOLY SHIT power levels. It's like trying to idiot-proof a nuclear power plant, and see Chernobyl for how well that works.
15:36
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 20:33:12]: As for not running into things, you need that even if your drives aren't high powered. Space is crowded around departures and arrivals, stuff is fast, and everything is expensive - which is to say, it's just like flying, and so there is space traffic control.
15:37
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 20:35:15]: With the distinction that space traffic control has a direct line to system defense, and if your ship appears to be not under command and acquiring a dangerous vector, they will blow you out of the sky before you hit anything. See the "Range Safety" post, but this is also a general rule for orbital space and people dumb enough to try to violate the inner-system speed limit.
15:37
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 20:41:24]: ...I should write a post on drives, as it might be easier than trying to cover it all in one. The original "torch" models were mostly fusion thermal, tending more and more towards pure fusion as drive performance became more and more, um, Epstein-ian.
15:37
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 20:43:29]: (Which includes the effects of vector-control-fu, but also whole rafts of exotic technologies being used to crank drive efficiency, most of whose details are kind of handwavy right now.)
15:37
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 20:47:45]: Space traffic control - there is the usual communications (see https://eldraeverse.com/2014/09/10/the-shipping-trade-3-outbound/ and https://eldraeverse.com/2017/11/19/the-other-half/ ) to back up the purely digital transfer. Belt and braces, and all that.
Alistair Young
The Shipping Trade (3): Outbound
“Lunar Transshipment One, Station Ops, this is CMS Greed and Mass-Energy in slot ailek corse three five on flight plan code niner-three-zero-eleven-one. Request taxi instructions for orbital 

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Alistair Young
The Other Half
(
of this.) “WynĂ©rias SysCon, this is CMS Greed and Mass-Energy inbound from Kythera System checking in, emergence point on bearing one-eleven ascending four from stargate, drift seven 

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15:37
[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 20:50:30]: The various bits of STC don't use remote-slave systems to fly manned vessels; apart from potential light-lag (more relevant as space gets more crowded) and communication reliability issues, the Flight Commander always has ultimate responsibility for - and therefore authority over - the operation of a starship.
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[word of god on general at 04/13/2019 20:51:03]: Sometimes limited remote systems are used to simplify docking maneuvers, and the like, but final control always rests with the ship.
15:37
[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 16:50:56]: First, let me point you back to https://eldraeverse.com/2015/01/24/things-that-make-things/ , just as a quick summary of local terminology.
Alistair Young
Things That Make Things
Since we’ve just passed the Matter Replicator trope, and since it may be relevant to an upcoming FAQ question, I thought I’d throw out some definitions relating to such things that may 

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[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 16:54:42]: Most of what the big autofacs churn out by the gigaton are components , meaning everything from I-beams to nanocircs, plastic pellets to purple paint, you name it. Because what the market wants is customizability, not off-the-rack products. So for smaller goods that use this sort of thing, those get shipped to your home autofac - or for larger goods, your neighborhood autofac - and assembled there into the end product, including all your customizations.
15:37
[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 16:56:47]: Cornucopias are mostly useful when you need something now, or when it's not available through the normal supply chain, or when traveling. Nanofacs , which are the core of the cornucopia, are also widely used in autofacs to grow things like nanocircs that can't be readily constructed any other way. (Usually as specialized fabbers, for efficiency.)
15:38
[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 19:13:08]: The real answer is that, yes, there's onboard support for preparing ration packs and, if all else fails, there's always the rat bars. But since the IL knows the morale value of eating well, the even more real answer is that there's a variant of the V40 RalihĂș IFV outfitted as a mobile chow hall.
15:38
[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 19:14:02]: @Ian Bruene Ah. That would be "logistics vehicles which can dock, and the rear compartment can, if need be, serve as an improvised airlock".
15:39
[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 19:50:38]: @Enderminion That's actually an option for these vehicles: these mass drivers are basically scaled up slugguns, which are designed to fire not just their standard slugs, but also bore-compatible "grenades", or even gyroc micromissiles with similar-to-grenade warheads. ("Grenade", in 'verse weapons parlance, goes all the way up to AMTM - i.e., antimatter thermal - which can get you 5 kilotons of boom in the 36mm variant, so this packaging doesn't impose many limitations on your CAS needs.)
15:40
[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 19:52:29]: [taste of rat bars] Heh. No - it tastes crumbly, dry, salty, and sour, and smells mostly like yeast.
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[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 19:58:21]: About 4" by 1". And the taste is, arguably, pretty good for something that's designed to nourish everything within a wide range of biocodes and last basically forever without losing nutritional value.
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[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 19:59:04]: But, y'know, they're the last-ditch food when you run out of everything else, including ration packs. At that point, all you care about is edibility.
15:41
[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 20:01:37]: (Meanwhile the chow hall is serving three-course meals with choice of wine, because the IL makes war in style. Partly by reason of not wanting to be outdone in decadence by the Navy boys, but mostly because it irritates the hell out of the enemy and amuses the general staff to charge prime beef against the psychological warfare budget.)
15:42
[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 23:13:08]: [Republic air support/superiority missions] Shuttlecraft, Republic Navy, Type Eleven
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[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 23:15:51]: Known affectionately, on the couple of occasions the IL has engaged them, as "Clay Chickens".
15:42
[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 23:18:23]: They perform exactly as you would expect from a non-specialized craft pressed into service by a society that deems itself too peaceful and enlightened to have actual military craft.
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[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 23:24:13]: It's a mid-range multipurpose small craft/interface vehicle.
15:42
[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 23:27:40]: As for design - well, it's a typical product of Republic engineering, which is to say, it's the product of central planning and design by committee to serve multiple purposes. It never got its rough edges knocked off (or better yet, separated into multiple vehicles) by the coquetries of the market, 'cause except in the Shell colonies, there isn't one. You get what the Production Group designed for you. It's not a Cold Equations-esque deathtrap, or even a terribly bad design, given their technical limitations. It's just trying to fit a half-dozen roles at once and suffers greatly from a lack of competing vessels in niche to make the engineers push the envelope.
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[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 23:33:09]: (Basically, it's what Starfleet would build if they didn't have their local magic.) Militarizing it involves yanking a sensor package off the bow end and duct-taping a laser in its place.
15:42
[word of god on general at 04/14/2019 23:36:53]: On another note, as you may have noticed, the Republic give neither names nor even class names to their shuttles. This is also often cited as a reason they fall right out of the sky, because you can't expect a ship with no soul to fight well, now can you?
15:47
[word of god on general at 04/17/2019 02:30:13]: "The Galians consider the nearby Isliar Primarchy, otherwise known in the Worlds as the epitome of staid conservatism, a decadent anarchy filled with whores, atheists, infidels, disorderly women, undisciplined men, weaklings, inverts, deviants, and shopkeepers. As such, it's probably for the best that they don't share a border with the Empire. "On the other hand, at least that would have been quieter."
15:48
[word of god on general at 04/17/2019 20:43:40]: "the Shards" is their astronomers' name for the Oort cloud, what with its discovery way back in history shattering the whole crystal-sphere theory of solar system containment.
15:48
[word of god on general at 04/17/2019 20:45:02]: A shardcruiser is a specialized long-range passenger/freight design to service that region, or at least its inner fringe. Not quite a lugger, but needs more legs than your average in-system or intersystem design.
15:49
[word of god on general at 04/18/2019 19:55:58]: @MarcusAurelius As far as their position on prison goes - well, the short form is that it doesn't do anything useful towards rehabilitation ('cause, y'know, being locked up with a bunch of other, often worse, criminals is not what you might call productive), actively impairs, even ceteris paribus , your chance of being a productive member of society in future, and in many cases, is just de facto torture-by-proxy. Inasmuch as if you lock criminals up together and let them beat and rape each other, the public gets to pretend their hands are clean and that it's not precisely what the plurality of vengeful assholes among them wanted to happen. And so, they would argue, euthanasia of the unfixable is actually substantially more humane.
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[word of god on general at 04/18/2019 19:58:31]: (Side note: not all murderers are deemed unfixable. People who kill as a crime of passion or for profit may - or of course may not - be salvageable; it tends to be your "for fun" types, your serial killers, etc., you get handed straight to the executioners on the basis of "entropic deformation of the soul".)
15:49
[word of god on general at 04/18/2019 20:10:00]: Now, before modern sophotech and meme rehab, if you were deemed potentially salvageable, that had a variety of possible meanings (and bearing in mind that you always had the opt-out option of euthanasia); most commonly, since they generally took the view that your special dysfunction should be kept as far from civil society as possible lest it prove contagious, that tended to mean a lengthy stay in a SaravĂłnite monastery practicing ethical self-improvement through labor, meditation, and study, until they felt that you really had amended yourself. (Those attempting to take advantage of this particular clemency were reminded in short order that the SaravĂłnites are a militant order with a lot of martial arts training to go with the practical psych, and a few stout monks will gladly explain the depth of your mistake to you on your way back to the court for... redisposition.) There was also the ability to volunteer for experimental rehabilitation treatment, which varied in its nature quite a lot. Bear in mind that the locals consider this sort of thing a medical problem, so we're not talking anything fluffy here; we may in fact be talking about this gent ( http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20090506#.V9z6_e1FyUk ) tinkering with your brainmeats until he finds the defective bit.
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[word of god on general at 04/18/2019 20:28:44]: One of those experiments might slightly resemble a prison of sorts - I expect the experiments came up with the "moral labyrinth" concept that we hear of briefly in Banks's The Player of Games - the physical maze in which you can walk out easily by correctly solving a lengthy series of ethical problems and acting accordingly. Only, y'know, implemented properly by a culture not wearing the maximum assholery hat.
15:50
[word of god on general at 04/18/2019 20:40:37]: But if someone has criminal urges that they don't want and would prefer to be cured of... well, how much risk is that worth? And, much like chains and pyres, it's an honorable death .
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[word of god on general at 04/18/2019 20:47:21]: That sort of case runs into some of the limits of meme rehab even if it is, for the sake of argument, desirable to attempt it.
15:50
[word of god on general at 04/18/2019 20:49:37]: Inasmuch as there are two reasons in which it is acknowledged as pointless: The one are cases in which you have to change the person so much to rehab them that you breach the legal definition of identity, at which point you're killing them and making a new person in their body. At which point, what is the point? The other are cases in which, sure, you can rehab them, but the rehabbed person will draw their sword and fall on it the moment you set them loose, at which point again, what is the point?
15:50
[word of god on general at 04/18/2019 20:55:09]: That being said, in the 'verse, "meme rehab" is the short, slangy form of "memetic rehabilitation and reconditioning", which isn't necessarily a thing of pure memetics. (Adjective only on the first noun.)
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[word of god on general at 04/18/2019 20:57:01]: Sure, it almost always involves replacing bad ideas with good ones, inasmuch as a remarkable number of dysfunctions can be traced back to bad ideas. But that's by no means all that it can include.
15:50
[word of god on general at 04/18/2019 20:58:26]: (For example, if someone pure-bio turns himself in to meme rehab for, say, pedophilic urges, part of the treatment will be literal meme rehab, but there'll also be neural microsurgery to fix the bad crosslinks at the root of the problem. Et cetera.)
15:51
[word of god on general at 04/19/2019 00:51:39]: No. For one thing, that only works if you would consider a hospital (or an asylum, say) as a prison. A prison is somewhere you're put to keep you away from the decent folk until your punitive time is up. These are places you go to be healed, and you stay until you're cured. For another, a prison is full of prisoners and has guards around the outside. These, on the other hand, are communities - and most of the people in them aren't prisoners at all.
15:51
[word of god on general at 04/19/2019 00:54:18]: Yes, you can't leave... but the term 'prison' is applying a term from our punitive/isolative model of justice to a model that's fundamentally about restoring balance and social harmony while and healing the damaged individual inasmuch as that's possible, and doing so will infallibly lead you into error.
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[word of god on general at 04/19/2019 01:02:15]: (On the latter - yes, you are expected to live by the SaravĂłnites Rule and take part in related activities as part of your rehabilitation, but in other ways, it's just like living in a small town. Just a small town where people understand how to deal with your... problem.
15:52
[word of god on general at 04/23/2019 04:43:32]: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/986278944424058881?s=12
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Simon Sarris (@simonsarris)
Most people are afraid of AI because they are mean to machines. The alarm clock only rings because he wants to be helpful.
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15:53
[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 18:03:43]: [formation of the IN] Commerce protection, mostly, at the time.
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[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 18:05:20]: And since this was the third month of Year Zero, the how mostly involved a new coat of paint and fresh flags for the war galleys, issuing new hats and jackets to the officers, and throwing out the remaining old letterhead that read "Royal Alatian Navy".
15:53
[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 18:45:35]: Also, the rules of war are very much different for reasons of war not being supposed to be sporting, and the moral balance between assassination and mass warfare being exactly the opposite of the way we look at it.
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[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 18:49:36]: Local rules of war and their differences from ours: https://eldraeverse.com/2012/07/25/trope-a-day-the-laws-and-customs-of-war/
Alistair Young
Trope-a-Day: The Laws and Customs of War
The Laws and Customs of War: There are several sets of these, locally; the Empire has its Imperial Rules of War, and so forth, but the ones people mean in the general case are those contained in th

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15:57
[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 18:50:47]: Note: Q-ships are allowed, since if you don't start nothin', you don't get nothin'. Although the distinction between "Q-ship" and "armed frontier trader" gets a mite fuzzy, in the same sort of way that the Vikings went on long trading voyages but the ships in question were still full of armed Vikings , belike.
15:57
[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 18:52:32]: Note 2: the rules of war forbid attacking medical personnel. People who don't follow that rule of war... you don't want to not follow that rule of war. (Chaplains are not protected, however, because military chaplains tend to be drawn from the orders of the war gods, and as such are combatant as fuck.)
15:58
[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 19:10:46]: The chief problem with fighting to the death is getting people (other than your elite fanatics) to actually do it. As a rule, people don't want to die, and it's a lot easier to get them to accept a risk of death than the certainty of death.
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[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 19:12:18]: The second problem with fighting to the death is that, knowing that you are going to do whatever it takes to kill as many of us as possible, and that there's no way we can avoid excessive loss of life on your side no matter how merciful we wish to be, it frees up an awful lot of otherwise unacceptable tactical options.
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[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 19:14:06]: And third, of course, the risk that you are going up against someone like Caliéne Sargas, whose response to people declaring that they will fight to the last man is a cheery "Your offer is acceptable." And then glassing the whole damn country from orbit, because, hey, you asked for it, pal.
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[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 19:17:59]: Admiral. But yes. Who is very useful for situations like those: her sheer delight in taking them up on their offers has reduced the number of people making silly-ass statements about fighting to the last or the ISIS-standard "we love death more than you love life" to a minimum.
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[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 19:20:03]: It's not much of a terror threat when your supposedly-intimidating statement produces a girlish giggle and a shopping trip to the Special Weapons Section.
15:58
[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 19:34:46]: As for Republic deployments -- there's a DS9 episode called "The Siege of AR-558". That. Imagine a crowd of security redshirts with handguns, lacking in armor, artillery, grenades, heavy guns, body armor, etc., etc. They are, y'know, an enlightened and peaceful society.
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[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 19:36:42]: It's fortunate that their fleet is rather better and that they have a lot of numbers, since not only could the IL go through them like a nuclear chainsaw through whipped cream, but despite their technological advantages, I wouldn't rate them against a decent 20th century military either .
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[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 19:39:35]: It's not that they couldn't build the tech if they wanted to find a strategic clue somewhere, but like the Federation, they're an enlightened, peaceful society. They don't go in for all this militarism schtick.
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[word of god on general at 04/25/2019 19:47:34]: Irony: Republic ships, despite being less advanced, work very hard to achieve a sleek, futuristic look, hence that trope. Imperial ships, despite being stuffed full of bleeding-edge technological wonders, will feel free to dress up the bridge in the gleaming brass and polished mahogany of an earlier age, because they think it looks cool.
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[word of god on general at 04/26/2019 06:43:08]: The thing about oxygen - and for those species with appropriate biochemistries, also ammonia, halogens, hydrogen, methane, and sulphides - is that they're all over the damn place waving signs reading "I'm an easily harnessed energy gradient!"
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[word of god on general at 04/26/2019 06:49:24]: Certainly you can, at great cost, turn yourself into a reasonably close approximation to a personal autarky, but it's the same sort of hobby as people today who live in nuclear bunkers and consume nothing but vitamin pills, organic algae, and recycled urine.
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[word of god on general at 04/26/2019 06:50:16]: Which is to say, you can do it, but you're a offputting shut-in who's found a particularly expensive and pleasure-free way to not get invited to any of the better parties.
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[word of god on general at 04/26/2019 06:52:30]: (Also, it doesn't help that by the time you've crammed everything needed for indefinite-term closed life support into and onto your body, you look like a morbidly obese Borg's less attractive cousin.)
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[word of god on general at 04/27/2019 07:36:01]: [team-based projects in the Imperial economy] @Morgrim Moon It varies; sometimes you'll contract with an team; sometimes you'll contract a lead and let them assemble their team to suit; sometimes you'll go to a contract broker and have them assemble you a team to spec. And there's a lot of reputation networking and good old-fashioned xicé networking going on, too. The balance of which depends a lot on personal workstyle.
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[word of god on general at 04/27/2019 07:37:09]: Plus there are bounty economy scenarios where you simply announce the problem you want investigated and the reward for doing it, and let people compete to bring you solutions.
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[word of god on general at 04/27/2019 07:42:02]: The same, incidentally, goes for non-sophont resources you may need for a job; in the agile free-market economy, the companies that own labs, say, and the companies that use labs, particularly specialized facilities aside, tend to not be the same company. Initiatives just contract for the use of the lab space, offices, processing cycles, etc., they need ad hoc for maximum flexibility.
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[word of god on general at 04/27/2019 07:47:04]: Initiative A finishes up on Tuesday, the owners hit the button to reprogram the smart-walls and the substrate while utility spiders shuffle equipment around overnight, and when Initiative B comes in on Wednesday morning, everything's set up their way down to the lab tech's coffee blend preferences.
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[word of god on general at 04/27/2019 07:50:41]: (There's a whole standardized facility-description-file language designed to make this sort of thing as easy as possible to set up, plus once that's done, they can customize for the specific people using their personal preference files. Which every building they ever enter, just about, is going to download anyway, to fine-tune the lighting and environmental controls in their vicinity and make sure all the chairs are maximally comfortable.)
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[word of god on general at 04/27/2019 07:55:54]: Lots of bandwidth everywhere. Especially in big commercial buildings, which tend to have massive hardwire hookups.
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[word of god on general at 04/27/2019 07:59:30]: But those personal oreferences are a basic system function, not specific to this. There , if you walk into a random coffee shop and sit down, you can observe the local lighting shift to best accommodate you, the chair reconfigure itself to your body shape, and dozens of other tiny for-your-comfort adjustments as soon as it knows you’re there. Knowing how you like your coffee ain’t but a fraction of it.
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[word of god on general at 04/27/2019 08:01:43]: That’s one advantage of carrying a personal AI around in your head. It can rewrite your prefs on the fly based on your current internal state.
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 18:27:13]: (Brief note on the earlier secession thing: I remembered this - https://eldraeverse.com/2016/08/30/on-secession/ - which mostly deals with what a tremendous charlie foxtrot it would be due to the multiple-individual-contractual-and-propertarian-relations, which is why they can be glad it never came up. The attitude , however, is as @0111narwhalz and @MarcusAurelius describe - very much "don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out... and don't come crawling back, either, you ungrateful bastards!" .)
Alistair Young
On Secession
I note that there are no provisions here for secession of nations. Oversight, deliberate, or covered elsewhere by other provisions and principles? Ah, secession. Let me explain. No, there is too mu

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16:03
[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 18:29:05]: On the current topic, though, I'll note that while you can and people do talk to their muses, since conversation is a large part of how we think, the big advantage of having a synnoetic AI is that it's synnoetic , and can hear you thinking. Once your partnership has matured, you live in a world where in all minor things, your will is done without you actually having to express it.
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 18:31:43]: Or, in that case, semi-Japanese. Emojitags, which are v-tags based on Eldraeic's attitudinal grammar.
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 18:32:01]: Projected In ideographic form.
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 18:33:11]: Originally designed for use in space, where you can't see people's expressions through their helmets.
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 18:36:50]: The direct emotional transmissions, I mean. Lots of specialized forms of formatted cognition, primarily exomemories, gnostic overlays, mnemonetic templates, and slinkies.
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 18:37:37]: (i.e., experience-memories, actual cognitive routines, data memories, and recorded sense experience.)
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 18:46:10]: For 'verse purposes, I generally run with the notion that most cognitive formats go through specific protocols and formatting for what amounts to safety purposes. Direct linkage often has... side effects.
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 18:49:55]: In that, the pilots directly interface with their ships to operate FTL, by solving the complex mathematical theorems needed to model spacetime's underside. In one of the books, we see two pilots in a relationship sharing a ship, which is something traditionally warned against - and then we see why, as they start copying each others mannerisms and finishing each other's sentences, as minds leak into each other.
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 18:50:16]: After all, the minds don't know where their edges are.
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 18:51:54]: It works much the same way in the 'verse - without some sort of controlling protocol, given the multitude-of-agents model of minds, linking minds together will produce one big mind which over time stops being able to be anything else.
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 18:52:21]: Oh, I'm not passing any judgement on the desirability of such a thing, just the sophotech of it.
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 18:54:06]: 'Verse-wise, the protocols are designed the way they are so you have to choose to engage in activities that may abolish your individual identity and can't stumble into them all unknowing. It's okay to be in a Fusion, so long as you chose to fuse.
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 19:03:43]: Yeah, I can see something like that being definitely recommended for combat confluxes, or any confluxes, really.
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[word of god on general at 04/28/2019 19:05:11]: That, and spending time surrounded by things designed to remind you strongly of you.
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[word of god on general at 04/29/2019 16:54:05]: So, today, I was reminded of the Air Force studies on voices that best get pilot's attention, especially in stressful moments, whose conclusions were that the top features were (a) women and (b) profanity - hence Bitching Betty, since no-one wanted to explain to Congress why they spent a million dollars teaching fighter planes to swear. I mention this for collectors of 'verse trivia. since I am fairly certain that given the engineering-first nature and rather more practical appreciation of the legionary vocabulary, Imperial-manufactured aircraft do in fact have a lady with a gloriously plummy accent instructing pilots to PULL THE FUCK UP.
16:07
[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 00:18:24]: @Unknown The automation revolution didn't cause significant social problems because people weren't idiots who made exactly the wrong decision at every point along the way. Which is both cynical and true. No nuclear war, because strategic nuclear weapons are terrible instruments for fighting a war with if you're going up against anyone remotely reasonable. All flitters, skimmers, and groundcraft are at least capable of being manually driven, in case you need to use them somewhere where the road-grid isn't. Like off-road. Doesn't mean they usually are.
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[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 20:31:11]: And here: https://eldraeverse.com/2012/04/30/exercising-government-by-means-of-virtue/
Alistair Young
Exercising Government by Means of Virtue
Some governments maintain a rigidly defined chain of command, rights and duties, from top to bottom – from a monarch, an autocrat, an elected council, or what have you, directives emerge and 

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16:08
[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 20:43:04]: As for what it does - okay, here's the top-level look. There are seven Ministries of the Crown (each of which contains several lower-level Ministries of the State, but details). You've got The Exchequer The Admiralty The Ministry of the Empire The Ministry of Harmonious Serenity The Ministry of State and Outlands The Ministry of Progress and Prosperity The Threefold Auditors of Impropriety plus the Imperial Service itself
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[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 20:45:27]: The Exchequer's remit is easy to describe: money. Counting it, minting it, spending it, and making it exist in the first place. Least likely thing: they also run the Imperial Banking & Credit Weave, which is to say, the interbank clearing network. For values of "run" these days equal to "extremely hands-off supervise", but its very first iteration was created so that the Exchequer could move money around conveniently.
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[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 20:47:12]: The Admiralty: likewise easy. The Military Service, military intelligence, and all their auxiliary functions.
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[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 20:50:37]: Ministry of the Empire: infrastructure functions; that which the governance needs for itself, and that which requires high-level coordination that no-one else was doing at the time. They have the media/transparency office, the postal service/couriers, the surveyors, the actually-public public health and ecology functions, the people who deal with interstate-up highways and skyways, look after unincorporated territory, and most importantly, balance externalities.
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[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 20:51:43]: Ministry of Harmonious Serenity: keep things harmonious and serene. To this end, they have the Constabulary, Investigation & Pursuit, the Emergency Management Authority, and Imperial State Security.
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[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 20:52:14]: Ministry of State and Outlands: diplomats, border guards, resident aliens.
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[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 20:54:47]: Ministry of Progress and Prosperity: making things get better, or more accurately, making it easier to make things better and harder to make 'em worse. Includes the Exploratory Service, the Grand Survey, public libraries, gene libraries, skill preservation, the copyright and patent office, Companies' House, the Market Liberty Oversight Directorate, and the standards people.
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[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 20:56:25]: Threefold Auditors of Impropriety: exactly what it says on the tin, three different ways. Internal Audit, which looks into waste and inefficiency; Censorious Scrutiny, which looks at improper social relationships and their consequences; and Service Security, which watches for conventional malfeasance.
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[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 20:57:19]: Notable for its redundancy and watching-the-watchmen internal structure, which goes so far as to have a triumvirate running the place so there's no level at which there's noone watching said watchmen.
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[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 20:59:46]: Then there's the bit called in technical language "the Imperial Service", which is actually the cross-cutting organization whose logarchies provide all the back-end support the Ministries need because otherwise the duplication would be horrendous, but which has some bits which deal with the public directly. Most notably "Imperial Services", which runs the front offices where citizen-shareholders can get stuff done . And are dedicated to customer service alone , as it were, so it gets done well .
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[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 21:01:28]: But also contains the Central Office of Records and Archives, which includes the equivalent of the census people, the historians, the college of arms, the registry of branches, the office of title and estate, and its subdivision, the Bureau of Unattached Chattels and Uncertain Titles, which deals with cleaning up the mess left behind when property and owner somehow fail to be linked.
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[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 21:03:25]: And that's pretty much it. Add 'em all up, they pretty much do everything the Charter empowers the governance to do, so there're very few local governances that need/bother to set up their own institutions.
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[word of god on general at 05/02/2019 21:05:08]: (That's all the executive, of course. The judicial and iatropsychic branches have their own setup.)
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[word of god on general at 05/04/2019 21:02:15]: [do the standard biomods include the ability to throw up on demand?] No, but they do include effective immunity to aconite, ammonia, antipyrine, arsenic, atropine, camphor, hydrocyanic acid and other common cyanides, iodine, picrotoxin, lead, strychnine, limited exposure to chlorine gas, and a number of other common organic and inorganic poisons; counteracting small quantities of formaldehydes, fullerenes, phthalates, and other industrial byproducts; resistance to heavy metal poisoning (although chelation is still required to remove it); and the ability to drink high-salt water without harm.
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 02:25:24]: ithréth is a very similar game to Go, except in one respect: it's played in four dimensions rather than two.
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 02:27:06]: (Masters of the game claim the true subtlety always likes in the ana and kata moves; beginners tend to find the complexity lies in the lack of four-dimensional gameboards or four-dimensional spaces to keep them in.)
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 05:55:49]: There's one like that (the time-travel game) in canon; the rules can't enforce consistency, of course, so essentially moving in such a way to create a temporal paradox is an instant loss for whoever's on the sharp end of it.
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 05:56:57]: So, on one hand, you might be able to assure victory by borrowing pieces from the future, but you have to weigh that against the risk that the earlier instance of them might be destroyed and cause you a paradox-loss.
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 05:58:27]: Likewise, you can send pieces into the future to reinforce yourself there, but then you don't have them now. And if you get them back from the future so you do have them now, then if they are destroyed in the future, you lose immediately if the game reaches the future and they're destroyed then.
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 16:27:10]: My pegasus design for the Advancedverse (which draws heavily from Tiny Sapient Ungulates) runs with wings that are feathered, but underneath said feathers are essentially bat-style but with additional potential stiffness - i.e., cartilaginous membranes stretched between what are essentially evolved finger-bones. (The adaptability of this combination helps explain their absurdly awesome maneuverability.) But one feature of TSUs that I retained for the forehooves is that while the pastern and hoof in equines are essentially fused versions of what in humans would be fingers and fingernails, a later evolution involved the re-division of the lowest part of the phalanges and the hoof wall to provide short "fingers" or "toes" with limited manipulatory capability. In the pegasai, this same evolution affects the phalanges which support the wings, providing wingtips with a similar limited gripping ability.
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 16:27:40]: (For those not familiar with Tiny Sapient Ungulates: https://jayrockin.tumblr.com/tagged/tiny+sapient+ungulates/ .)
Jay Eaton
Jay Eaton
The blog of a digital artist and biology enthusiast. ☘ ART TAG PATREON KO-FI Tipjar Gumroad Store
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 18:39:12]: The Sera Esklav , or to give it its untranslated name, DarĂ­Ă« i-Esklav , is the most popular brand of esklav brewer and/or fabber on the market. As iconic as its obvious counterpart, the "Mr. Coffee".
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 18:40:40]: (Most are simple countertop models. Of course, at the high end, you get this sort of thing: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/31/fb/20/31fb20121b0e015bce09d3a6284a5edc.jpg )
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 18:48:08]: https://eldraeverse.com/2016/04/29/theremin/
Alistair Young
Theremin
(Alternate words: Tear, terms, thinking, tutorial. Actually, I have a pretty good idea for tutorial, but the darn thing just won’t gel. So you get this bit of silliness instead.) The music wa

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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 18:49:04]: (More seriously, that's about as impossible to answer as "what sort of music would humans most enjoy?" But here, have some general notes on genres with staying power: https://eldraeverse.com/2014/03/23/trope-a-day-future-music/ )
Alistair Young
Trope-a-Day: Future Music
Future Music: While the Empire has been around for a very, very long time and as such has accumulated far more musical genres that I can reasonably describe, here are some notable ones – with

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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 20:36:06]: Classic uploading/downloading is the kind that works on natural brains, and with that, you pretty much can't do anything that doesn't fit naturally in that type of brain, although that still allows reasonable scope for modification. That sort of uploading, too ("first-stage uploading") produces what they'd call a mind emulation.
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 20:37:19]: A mind emulation is an actual map of the neural network of the brain, along with ancilliary structures, and while it can be executed in an emulation environment, it's not the same thing as a mind-state vector. It's a literal emulation of the organic functions.
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 20:38:36]: Eventually, with time and Science!, they learned how to compile that (in all its many assorted per-species variations) into what is now called a mind-state; the algorithm represented by the neural network, without the platform dependencies.
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 20:39:10]: That , in turn, can be executed on any Universal Noetic Architecture-compatible brain or cogence core.
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 20:40:13]: In growing artificial bioshells, their brains are basically formatted as UNA-compatible neurocomputers which execute a mind-state, rather than the custom software-implemented-in-hardware that natural biology produces.
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 20:43:50]: (Side advantage: you can download a mind-state into a 'laced UNA-compatible brain in a matter of minutes; downloading into a natural brain-structure, which means in practice building a natural brain-structure, takes hours . Side note: it is actually possible to run the uploading/compilation process in reverse on a sufficiently understood platform to produce a "natural" implementation from a mind-state, which would allow cross-species transfer into a natural brain, but that's a whole other PITA that tends to have a lot of gaps in it that need patching. UNA comes with "device drivers" to assist in integration.)
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 20:44:20]: It does, but evolved biobrains aren't exactly running at peak theoretical performance in the first place.
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[word of god on general at 05/06/2019 20:44:44]: Evolution optimizes for "just good enough", after all.
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[word of god on general at 05/07/2019 01:02:36]: "What is the human doing, Fnargl?" "I don't know, Zerb, but we should probably fetch it medical assistance."
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[word of god on general at 05/07/2019 01:03:30]: ^ This is how well your dominance posturing works across species.
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[word of god on general at 05/07/2019 01:16:42]: I should perhaps have said sophont species. 'Cause the point I'm making is that while it may mostly work reliably on branches of the same evolutionary tree, those who came out of entirely different ecologies won't be reading the same cues.
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[word of god on general at 05/07/2019 01:23:10]: And as the saying goes, "To make a linobir your friend, kill him -- but then he's dead, so what's the point?"
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[word of god on general at 05/08/2019 20:54:21]: [what is a genarch] Seniormost of the family and all its lineages. Clan chief, essentially - the Sargas of Sargas, as we might say the Macdonald of Macdonald.
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[word of god on general at 05/08/2019 20:55:47]: In most but not all cases this is the eldest of the group of members of the house with the largest number of generations descended from them. Some Houses have different traditions, like, say, the Sargas.
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[word of god on general at 05/08/2019 20:56:58]: (There's a couplet from the Law of the Jungle : Because of his age and his cunning, because of his gripe and his paw / In all that the Law leaveth open, the word of your Head Wolf is Law.
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[word of god on general at 05/08/2019 20:58:41]: Sargas tradition is that you keep the genarchy for as long as you survive the genarchy, on the grounds that age and cunning are both needed to ride herd on a family like theirs.)
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[word of god on general at 05/08/2019 21:02:11]: If you take out the incumbent, you get his chair. Mind you, unless your talent matches up to your ambition and you are significantly better than he was, your incumbency is likely to be measured in hours, at best.
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[word of god on general at 05/08/2019 21:03:01]: It also helps to have the backing of a sizable chunk of the senior family.
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[word of god on general at 05/08/2019 21:05:26]: And, to steal a krogan word, krannt.
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[word of god on general at 05/09/2019 20:18:18]: Reminded by #dank , another fun piece of controversy dodged by not touching the issue of a human first contact is that, if we're being all technical, eldrae have races, but humans don't . Only clines. And we all know just how much Imperials love to be technical.
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[word of god on general at 05/09/2019 20:27:56]: Especially since they're chiefly distinguished by variations of eye, skin, and hair color, and even more subtle characteristics, so they mostly don't look as different as what humans would think of as "races".
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[word of god on general at 05/09/2019 20:29:02]: On the other hand, they do breed true and don't produce mixes, and so actually are races/subspecies in the biological sense, while human variation is all along a spectrum and doesn't breed true, hence aren't, despite appearing more like it.
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[word of god on general at 05/09/2019 20:30:42]: (Okay, granted, if you're one of the kireldrae whose genetics threw up the "my hair is naturally magenta" gene, it ain't all that subtle.)
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[word of god on general at 05/09/2019 21:01:53]: Yeah. There's considerable variation within each, but everyone falls within one of them. ...okay, that's not quite true. If you had a grandparent of a third race, for example, their genetics might stick around and pop up in you, so it's not quite that clear-cut. Probability decreasing with generation, as you'd expect.
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[word of god on general at 05/10/2019 05:00:33]: As for innocents, two things to take into account: The first is that much of the ‘verse and the Empire in particular does not recognize the collective-irresponsibility principle that lets us conveniently separate the actions of a polity from the actions of those making it up. Ordinary-citizenhood doesn’t count for much in terms of innocence, therefore, especially when you live in freakin’ Tortuga, contributing to the regime. There’s a whole lot of elsewhere you could be or elsewhat you could be doing.
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[word of god on general at 05/10/2019 05:10:20]: The second is that tying yourself up in that sort of scenario positively invites people to use sophont shields to hide behind, or to commit their special crimes behind the security of their own population. There is a formula for this. Collateral budgets are assigned, and kept within.
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[word of god on general at 05/10/2019 05:37:31]: As for sophistication - if you’re looking for “sophistication” in foreign policy the way we practice it, you aren’t going to find it here, because - well, it’s not working out so well for today’s practitioners, is it? Subtlety and sophistication are the domain of the diplomats and manipulators. Down at this end of foreign policy, they prefer the old-school version that runs with the bloody-minded certainty of consequences for those who do harm to Imperial citizen-shareholders. Like, say, Rome, or the Mongols.
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[word of god on general at 05/10/2019 05:42:47]: Now, you may not like this particular policy - I would expect most 21st century Westerners, at least, not to. Because - well, a Utopia it may be, but nobody said it was a perfect world.
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[word of god on general at 05/10/2019 05:52:04]: As a side note, I feel very sorry for anyone who tried to take an Imperial hostage. I’m pretty sure it didn’t work out for them.
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[word of god on general at 05/10/2019 05:53:08]: But that aside: if you give in to hostage-takers, you encourage the taking of hostages, much like changing your policies in response to terrorism encourages terrorism.
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[word of god on general at 05/10/2019 05:54:20]: The IMS has spent many, many years teaching absolutely everyone that the only thing tactics like that get you is a very educational death .
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[word of god on general at 05/10/2019 05:57:52]: I also note that this point of view is brought to you by the people who officially approve and teach the exact opposite approach to self-and-property defense that we do, which is to say that you should resist anyone who tries to victimize you to any degree with any and all force at your disposal and damn the consequences.
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[word of god on general at 05/10/2019 05:59:44]: Forget “money isn’t worth your life,” or whatever the cliche is. It’s “your self-determination is priceless “. Flesh can heal a lot more easily than you can climb back off your knees.
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[word of god on general at 05/10/2019 06:14:06]: Another illustration in mindset difference, incidentally, is that from an Imperial point of view, if you aren't the sort of person who belongs in that sort of regime, your hierarchy of preferences is (a) a party with some like-minded friends and a waterfall; (b) leaving, one way or another; (c) death -- all ranked above remaining and being part of/tolerating the regime. So it's easy to come to the conclusion that the folks in regimes like that divide neatly into the people who - while it would obviously be preferable to assist in revolt or rescue - would consider being dead an improvement if those alternatives are not available, and those who need to be made dead for other reasons.
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[word of god on general at 05/10/2019 06:16:37]: While it is possible for them to apprehend intellectually the mindset of "Better Red Than Dead," as it applies to other peoples , it is for them a most unnatural way of thinking, quite possibly a species of insanity. "Traumatic parabulia", or some such.
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[word of god on general at 05/10/2019 06:20:34]: (As I've said from time to time, remember the blue and orange morality. If it produces results not to your human tastes, then I've done my job.)
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[word of god on general at 05/15/2019 01:10:59]: [dealing with organic memory limitations] Diaries, and mnemonic techniques.
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[word of god on general at 05/15/2019 01:12:03]: (The limited capacity of the brain is, I suspect, rather overstated due to aging's other problems, because it's not like we store an eidetic record anyway . But nonetheless.)
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[word of god on general at 05/15/2019 01:21:31]: @Unknown As said back here: https://eldraeverse.com/2017/08/13/june-and-julys-questions/ The horror genre is not much of a thing, there.
Alistair Young
June and July’s Questions
(Somewhat belated, for which I apologize, but day-job-wise, it’s been a hell of a month. Actually, it continues to be, hence the dearth of postings in August, and now I’m about to ship 

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[word of god on general at 05/15/2019 01:25:11]: As a side note, given the characteristic reaction to fear that we discussed a little while ago, that may also explain why fear-for-fun doesn't fit well into their cognome, and one might also consider the difficulties of an art-form tuned to make your audience fighting mad.
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[word of god on general at 05/15/2019 01:34:48]: By the time you satisfy the audience's insistence that things get punched in the face by a space-magic fist of doom, the genre becomes functionally indistinguishable from action/adventure.
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 18:16:56]: decadent (n.): what less awesome civilizations say more awesome civilizations are; see also sour grapes .
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 18:20:09]: People who are motivated can fork to gain additional selfpower, therefore, but a lazy person who tries to fork to get out of working will very quickly discover that what you end up with is a roomful of lazy asshats arguing over which one of them should change the channel.
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 18:23:39]: You can partly get around this with cognitive surgery (as in the specialized golems in the Brin novel), but if you're a lazy person who makes a motivated, ambitious fork, the likelihood is that the very first thing that fork will do is file for emancipation from your lazy ass and spend the rest of ever making you look like the worse twin.
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 18:24:21]: tl;dr you can't escape your fundamental you-ness without changing you .
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 18:30:55]: [standard-issue legion "rifle"] The IL-15i Battlesystem battle carbine.
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 18:32:49]: To quote: "The primary weapon, a battle carbine, of the Empire’s light legionaries, combining in one unit a standard carbine and an underslung sluggun. The IL-15i is the most advanced battle carbine in the Empire, designed to be used in a teamware system. This carbine can designate targets and coordinate indirect squad fire, and comes with an integral trigraphic aim point sight, telescopic sight, infrared vision, gun camera, modal radiative striping, and a small gyroscope system that helps to dampen movements from recoil, making it extremely reliable and controllable."
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 18:50:44]: In local parlance, "carbine" means "standard longarm", i.e., not a sniper or a sluggun or something exotic. They don't call 'em rifles because, well, coilguns aren't.
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 19:07:15]: Actually, let me just post here the list of standard slugthrower types: There is the carbine, which is a light automatic rifle-equivalent. It also serves as the SMG (by configuring for rapid fire) and a shotgun (by configuring for rapid fire and spread, by oscillating the last stages of the mass driver). The sniper, which is the for-long-range-and-accuracy optimized version. The pistol, which is the standard hand weapon. By doing the same final-stage oscillation it can produce a sawn-off shotgun effect. The sluggun, which instead of firing flechettes like the others fires, well, slugs. Or grenades, or micromissiles, letting it effectively eat the niches of the grenade launcher and even light mortars. And since one of those grenade-type rounds is canister shot, the heavy shotgun. The hand cannon, which is a sluggun cut down to pistol size, trading off speed, accuracy, and recoil for unbeatable stopping power in a small package. And the battle carbine, the standard battlefield weapon, which puts a carbine and an underslung sluggun into one unit.
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 19:08:40]: (Since the hand cannon takes standard sluggun ammunition form factors, this does mean that you can theoretically fire antimatter grenades full-auto from a handgun. So far as I know, no-one has yet been stupid enough to try it.)
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 19:12:05]: @Ian Bruene For reasons given in the FAQ, we do not look too closely at energy levels. Let's just say that at normal non-hunting power levels, an unarmored target is gonna look all somewhat-charred ground-beefy along the penetration path.
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 19:15:00]: Power switching is simplified by associating an individual superconducting capacitor with every coil. Flash-charge together from the main powercell, then discharge in order as commanded by the photonic coil-control bus.
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 19:19:42]: And cooling is the biggest issue, as you might expect. Imagine some pretty chunky heat sinks, along with radiative striping to vent the heat. When it says "do not touch" on certain areas of you slugthrower, it means "this will burn you".
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 19:21:14]: Most civilian weapons use internal, bench-replacement only heat sinks, because the thermal goo gives them a decent capacity and they only need replacing very occasionally, when the goo starts to crystallize after lots of heat-cool cycles.
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 19:22:44]: Military-grade versions that expect high, sustained firing rates and thus are likely to run into the "thermal capacity exceeded, please stand by" error use external heat sinks, mounted in... well, you can guess, right?
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 19:56:27]: If you go digging in the Gal-sabra system, for example, you can find all sorts of evidence that they weren't kidding even slightly about the whole "convert or die" thing.
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[word of god on general at 05/18/2019 19:59:58]: (Although, really, while the mass graves there may be unmarked, they built a whole bunch of monuments and so forth marking the Purge of the Infidel, so you don't have to go looking for evidence. Special credit goes to the lovely children's museum in the capital. Build-Your-Own model death camps with realistic self-igniting heretics, only fifteen exval in the gift shop!)
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[word of god on general at 05/19/2019 17:22:48]: @Zarpaulek They're mentioned here under their untranslated name; trakelpanis trakĂłras amĂĄn https://eldraeverse.com/2016/08/12/the-problem-of-choice/ .
Alistair Young
The Problem Of Choice
Given the overall emphasis the eldrae place on freedom of choice and freedom of choices, how do they deal with issues of overchoice and the apparently paradoxical consequence that having too many c

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[word of god on general at 05/19/2019 17:24:51]: From-the-notes summary: "The trakelpanis trakĂłras amĂĄn, or “Great Drakes”, are an extinct precursor race that once dominated the region of space near and encompassing the modern Associated Worlds, including EliĂ©ra, believed to be a construct of theirs. The shell-world at ThalĂ­Ă€r (Principalities) is also believed to be a possible trakelpanis trakĂłras amĂĄn creation. It is believed that the trakelpanis trakĂłras amĂĄn flourished in a roughly spherical region around 5,800 light-orbits across, whose center was located roughly halfway between the modern Empire and the Eponian Cluster, to trailing. (It is unknown how the Mazir findings – obviously from another Precursor race, correlate with this; perhaps the Mazirian race were stealthy intruders within the Drakes’ space.) What little is known of them suggests that they had an at least partially silicon-based biochemistry, stood approximately 500’ tall, and weighed many thousands of tons. They had wings with a span of hundreds of feet, although if they were capable of flight, it assuredly was via processes having little to do with aerodynamics. (If the theory of the trakelpanis trakĂłras amĂĄn origin of the eldrae is correct, it is likely that vector control techlekinesis filled in the gaps.) The trakelpanis trakĂłras amĂĄn were sophont and extremely intelligent. They communicated verbally as well as (it is believed) through farspeech, and had an extensive written language consisting primarily of pictographs. They carved vast caverns out of the mountains in which they made their homes, covering the walls with their etched writings. They also created and used sophisticated technological tools, fashioned decorative items as well as practical ones, and lived in organized communities, in which one or at most a small number of trakelpanis trakĂłras amĂĄn were surrounded by their servitors."
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[word of god on general at 05/20/2019 15:10:45]: The culture is conveniently such that it produces plenty of adventurer types, including the weirdseekers whose life model is pretty much based on finding the unusual and poking it to see what happens.
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[word of god on general at 05/20/2019 15:26:45]: Free traders are entrepreneurs who put merchanter ethics well above law and have a love for being the most cunning guy in a a hostile business environment.
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[word of god on general at 05/23/2019 20:43:02]: Also, I added an entry on decadence to the FAQ: "Or, to be more precise, if you look up decadent in the dictionary, you will find that it has two senses: 1. in a state of deterioration and decay, especially moral decline 2. luxuriously self-indulgent That human languages conflate sense 1 (bad) with sense 2 (awesome), they would say, tells you a lot of things about humanity, most of them uncomplimentary."
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[word of god on general at 05/23/2019 20:53:41]: @Unknown Currently the jury is out on great filters; the problem exists, per -- https://eldraeverse.com/2015/06/01/a-fermi-stance/ -- but the question remains unanswered. OPERATION BERSERKER VOID would appreciate any useful data or theories on that point.
Alistair Young
A Fermi Stance
“The Starfall Arc is old, its history a tale of fourteen billion years. A tale, moreover, littered with elder races, ancient Powers, and primordial civilizations godlike in their power – very few o

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[word of god on general at 05/23/2019 21:00:05]: And no, you can't make an FTL anti-planet missile that strikes a planet instantly: frameslip drives have the same issues with the space-time stress-energy tensor that stargates do. I mean, you can build an intersystem missile that drops out of frameslip at the appropriate time and proceeds on conventional drives just like you can build an intersystem missile that makes stargate jumps to its destination, but if you try and run the missile up to an (inner) planet at FTL speeds, what you actually get is a catastrophic bubble collapse that converts the missile to a smear of exotic particles somewhere outside the orbit of Uranus.
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[word of god on general at 05/23/2019 21:29:35]: Oh, and on the respiration thing above: diamond blood comes in the standard model, now. Which is to say, dedicated nanotech hemocules capable of transporting oxygen and sequestering carbon dioxide with great and super-biological efficiency.
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[word of god on general at 05/23/2019 21:30:32]: Estimated performance: hold your breath for a couple of hours of low activity levels; about half an hour under stress.
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[word of god on general at 05/23/2019 21:31:54]: So not a huge call for the gills unless you live underwater for long periods - and if you do, there are lots of other things you need to upgrade, too.
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[word of god on general at 05/24/2019 15:16:13]: What, like the ripknife? ( https://eldraeverse.com/2016/11/07/yeah-maybe-not-that-short/ )
Alistair Young
Yeah, Maybe Not That Short
Academician Sesca Galith stepped up behind the podium, and tapped it gently to begin. The audience quieted rapidly as she held up a wickedly-pointed poniard, of oddly-textured metal, with lights gl

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[word of god on general at 05/24/2019 15:16:44]: (Yes, someone immediately thought of sticking this on the end of a projectile.)
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[word of god on general at 05/29/2019 04:02:41]: The Fundamental Contract is considered inalienable. So you can’t sign away the requirement for consent, your right to defend yourself and others, or the fundamental elements (mutual agreement without fraud) and obligations of contract.
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[word of god on general at 05/29/2019 23:11:05]: [bug-out device] Depends on model. (And note that since it's intended for use in often-hostile scenarios, you don't want to be trusting the local infrastructure.)
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[word of god on general at 05/29/2019 23:13:19]: So, you have a one-shot transmitter (cheap: radio; mid-range: neutrino; expensive: tangle) powered by a tiny antimatter generator, and when it triggers, the bug-out device dumps a safely-encrypted version of your mind-state down it.
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[word of god on general at 05/29/2019 23:15:49]: If you are feeling paranoid and/or have proprietary tech you don't want the oppo getting their hands on, you can up the antimatter charge a bit to be sure your body gets incinerated.
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[word of god on general at 05/29/2019 23:16:38]: If you just want to be vengeful, you can up the AM charge a bit more, and be confident of taking them with you. Along, quite possibly, with the rest of the city block.
16:39
[word of god on general at 05/30/2019 02:27:42]: And, yes, you do not engage in lighthugger combat, because (a) you are a fragile highly-specialized-and-not-for-combat ship, (b) you are stuffed with antimatter , and (c) with very few exceptions there is literally nothing better at running the fuck away.
16:39
[word of god on general at 05/30/2019 02:29:37]: And, y'know, stern chases in the 'verse are generally acknowledge to be a pain in the firing solution because of the extreme difficulty of shooting through the plume of a torch drive. This is multiplied many times over when it's a lighthugger drive, since, well, unless you can shoot black holes, you'll have trouble finding ammunition that can survive to close.
16:39
[word of god on general at 05/30/2019 03:21:44]: @Ian Bruene Once you detach, you aren't changing most of your vector until you can put the band back together. You don't want to do that unless you have to, and even then, at the last moment.
16:39
[word of god on general at 05/30/2019 03:23:53]: Bear in mind that interceptions in the deep black are a weird subcategory of battle where you start out charging at each other at near-relativistic velocities. That does weird things to sensor ranges, timings, weapons effectiveness, and so on.
16:40
[word of god on general at 05/30/2019 14:37:22]: Anyway, since this is #general, here is your quick history of 'verse uploading techniques: First up: destructive brainpeeling of deceased brains. Take it out, sit it on a membrane disassembler, and build a detailed map as you take it apart. Not great, especially because you have to be dead first. Second: high-resolution NMRI to build a sub-cell resolution (about 2 nanometers) brain-map. Later replaced by in turn by neutrino helicality scanners for better resolution. Takes several minutes to build the image.
16:41
[word of god on general at 05/30/2019 14:40:12]: You don't need to be knocked out for the process; the brain's structural state doesn't change that much over the course of several minutes. There will be inconsistencies in the dynamic state, but that amounts to no more than some disorientation while it gets itself sorted out; walk it off. (And it helps to try to chill, meditate, or otherwise not cogitate intensely during the scan.)
16:41
[word of god on general at 05/30/2019 14:41:26]: This is assuming that you have a pure-bio brain, of course. If you have a vector stack, the cerebral bridge can just pull the latest state from that; takes a few seconds and is much closer to perfectly consistent.
16:41
[word of god on general at 05/30/2019 14:53:01]: Also, in some jobs, it's more important to have older archives than others. The ISS, for example, keeps regular agent backups on file so that if someone is pwned, overshadowed, or doubled they can trace back and figure out exactly when .
16:41
[word of god on general at 05/30/2019 15:09:41]: Now, speaking 'verse for the moment, the commonly accepted version is what might be best translated as infomation dualism , or iconic dualism , which simply holds that ideas are independent of the substrates that express them. (Closest to Plato, I suspect.) So, in its simplest form, that the concept of a triangle remains even if some Geomcidal Maniac purged the universe entirely of three-sided objects, descriptions of three-side objects, and people who think about three-sided objects.
16:41
[word of god on general at 05/30/2019 15:12:00]: As applied to the mind-body problem, its claim is that the relationship between mind and body is isomorphic to the relationship between algorithm and program - idea and expression of idea.
16:41
[word of god on general at 05/30/2019 15:15:06]: Unlike traditional mind-body dualism, this doesn't require any nonphysical substances or supernaturalism; only that the concept of a thing isn't dependent upon the instance of a thing. Essence precedes existence.
16:42
[word of god on general at 05/30/2019 15:16:11]: (Pattern identity precedes logically from this inasmuch as any instance of my self-concept must be me, just as any triangle must be a triangle.)
16:42
[word of god on general at 05/30/2019 15:22:37]: In some ways that's arguably compatible with material-reality-only monism. On the other hand, if we go fully existential materialist (and you never go full existential materialist!) it isn't, but since that leaves us in a position of affirming the concept of the nonexistence of concepts, I don't worry about it all that much.
16:43
[word of god on general at 06/01/2019 18:46:16]: @Zarpaulek Yes, way back in the day. Reincarnation for those who did not emulate an eikone perfectly enough to join with their concept.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/03/2019 11:17 PM
[word of god on fanfic at 08/20/2018 20:06:07]: A thing likely to muck up such a neural net, of course, is that eldrae names come from more'n a few different ethnic naming traditions; say, the Azikhanian Vitremarvis and Vidumarvis as compared, say, to the Selenarian Oricalcios, the Cestian Cyprium, the Ochale Tsurilen, and so forth. So you've got an interestingly disjoint set to deal with.
23:21
[word of god on fanfic at 12/18/2018 06:43:23]: [on the nature of basilisks] And indeed, most of them don't: the leading examples are things like the Out-of-Mind textures and the Must-Have-It Box.
23:21
[word of god on fanfic at 12/18/2018 06:44:04]: (The Must-Have-It Box being the only class of object which is specifically exempted from all laws concerning theft. Because everyone Must Have It.)
23:22
[word of god on fanfic at 12/20/2018 04:37:07]: RKVs are Tier II prohibited weapons (i.e., planet-killers). Any civilization that uses them gets wiped off the face of the galaxy; all signatories to the Ley Accords are required to enforce this ruling. The Accords don’t strictly require that to mean wiping out the entire civilian population, but everyone involved in authorizing or executing the attack ends up dead as a minimum, and whatever’s left of the civ is going to be under a painful and deeply intrusive proctorship at best, and quite possibly back to the Paleolithic.
23:22
[word of god on fanfic at 12/20/2018 04:39:04]: If there is one thing the whole galaxy is agreed on, it is THOU SHALT NOT FUCK WITH STAR-KILLERS, PLANET-KILLERS, ECOCIDERS (on garden worlds), OR UNCONTROLLED SELF-REPLICATING WEAPONS.
23:26
[word of god on technicalities at 11/11/2018 21:34:34]: Context: one of the convenient uses for non-local momentum transfer, if you have such a thing and a very large momentum sink, is as tremendously effective armor ("singularity-locking"). In the 'verse, that's what makes stargates very, very hard to kill; your weapon touches it and stops dead in its reference frame, and the gate kernel spins a little bit faster.
23:26
[word of god on technicalities at 11/11/2018 21:35:17]: So what I'm looking to figure out is what happens when you throw a small moon at it, or otherwise manage to push the system beyond the limit with a giant infusion of momentum.
23:27
[word of god on technicalities at 11/11/2018 21:38:52]: Well, I figured there'd be a strong likelihood of a failure mode along the lines of "the kernel liberates all of its mass-energy in one go; kiss your star system goodbye and warn the neighbors". :D But, y'know, if there are more interesting options around, I'd like to have 'em to play with.
23:27
[word of god on technicalities at 11/11/2018 21:44:27]: Twofold: one is being a massive momentum-sink and energy store, and the other is - since they're made in entangled pairs - to use the postulated relationship between entanglement and quantum-foam-level wormholes to let the gate connect reliably to its twin.
23:27
[word of god on technicalities at 11/11/2018 21:47:37]: The Susskind-Maldacena hypothesis, that is. ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wormholes-quantum-entanglement-link/ , since I don't have the original paper any more.) It fits well with the underlying 'verse assumption that the correct QM interpretation is NLHV.
Physicists Find a Link between Wormholes and Spooky Action at a Di...
The new theory connects quantum entanglement with Einstein’s general relativity
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23:28
[word of god on technicalities at 11/11/2018 21:57:01]: As a side note: they do have what we would probably call regular wormhole tech. (Had that first, in fact; I figure it's easier to get to.) It's just that given how difficult it is to get anything but a single-rooted tree that channels all long-distance traffic right past your capital, Ring Dynamics noped right out of the thought of using that for interstellar transit until every other possibility had been explored.
23:29
[word of god on technicalities at 11/11/2018 22:08:42]: @Unknown Very well, thank you. 😃 That message popping up on your blue box (i.e., the widget that talks to the gate) just means that the gate's got a lock on a wormhole that will get you your destination at the right t, in the empire-time reference frame. (Fiddling with that step - skew-framing - is what lets you try to do Stupid Time Travel Tricks, which might even not kill you. Omitting that step... well, that'll kill you pretty definitely. Urban legends about starships which screwed this up and met dinosaurs/were eaten by the Cold Ones/fell right out of the universe/made bank on next year's stock prices aside.)
23:29
[word of god on technicalities at 11/11/2018 22:13:54]: Well, leaving aside for a moment the particular case of wormholes forming CCLs, the causality rules for the 'verse are that you can't ever violate global causality. You can, however, violate local causality and get away with it. Which mostly means that you're allowed predestination paradoxes, but not grandfather paradoxes. Or that while every cause has an effect and vice versa, they don't necessarily have to be in that order from any particular observer's viewpoint (which is already the case in standard relativity).
23:29
[word of god on technicalities at 11/11/2018 22:17:02]: And you can't change the past: it's already happened, and if you were there, you were there, and will be there along your personal timeline, but you are guaranteed to do whatever it was you already did. (As the enforcement mechanism for this, I invoke the mechanism proposed by.... shit, someone who's name I can't remember right now, but they proposed destructive interference of wavefunctions as the enforcer of consistency protection. Basically, anything that would create an inconsistency gets a forced probability of zero.)
23:30
[word of god on technicalities at 11/11/2018 22:29:00]: Regarding predestination paradoxes: yeah, that's why you can't set up one using a loop of wormholes, or other continuously connected method; you get the whole virtual particle loop with the endlessly redoubling intensity and catastrophic collapse somewhere along the line.
23:30
[word of god on technicalities at 11/11/2018 22:33:39]: With a discontinuous path, you don't get the automatic catastrophic collapse from looping virtual particles. It's still possible to induce one if you put something in a position to double exponentially, etc., but since that creates an inconsistency, consistency protection censors that out for you and leaves behind only the worldlines where you didn't do that.
23:32
[word of god on technicalities at 12/04/2018 05:40:24]: @0111narwhalz The trouble is that muon matter and electron matter don't interact, because while muons Pauli exclude muons and electrons electrons, they don't exclude each other.
23:32
[word of god on technicalities at 12/04/2018 05:42:54]: So in the 'verse, for example, muon metal makes great blade shields and magnetic nozzle structures for torch drives because it's ludicrously refractory and can stand the heat, but you have to attach it to the rest of the drive with a magnetic couple, because it will pass through normal matter as if it wasn't there. Which also makes it useless for, say, armor. You could stick a giant wake shield of super-strong, super-dense muon iron on the front of your lighthugger and it would be completely useless, since the space-junk you want to armor against will just fly right through it.
23:32
[word of god on technicalities at 12/04/2018 06:08:26]: How do you one-up a nuclear isomer battery?
23:33
[word of god on technicalities at 12/04/2018 06:08:34]: A baryon isomer battery.
23:33
[word of god on technicalities at 12/04/2018 06:10:32]: Because nothing says Inadvisably Applied Femtotechnology than storing energy in overstressed quark-quark bonds.
23:36
[word of god on technicalities at 12/18/2018 06:22:10]: It varies widely between worlds, but an average populated planet’s contributing about an exabyte a day to the ‘weave. Internal traffic’s a lot bigger thanks to all the layered caching, and most of the IoT traffic only needs to be local.
23:38
[word of god on technicalities at 12/18/2018 06:30:49]: [nature of the Transcend] @xandeross Well, it’s everyone. In the sense of - if you’ve read A Miracle of Science , you know Mars? That.
23:38
[word of god on technicalities at 12/18/2018 06:32:49]: It’s got a whole lot of minds and subminds and so forth within it, but that’s the essence of the thing. As for its main job: it’s the impossible circle-squarer that lets you have perfect liberty and perfect coordination at the same time.
23:39
[word of god on technicalities at 12/18/2018 06:37:55]: But it's got a lot of parts. Unification, for example, is the archai whose entire business is mediating between sophonts. It's the giant oversoul that whispers quiet suggestions and orchestrates chance happenings and generally fiddles behind the scenes to ensure that irreconcilable conflicts are avoided and good things always happen, with a side order of making the pathetic fallacy true and pronoia a perfectly accurate assessment of how the universe works.
23:39
[word of god on technicalities at 12/18/2018 06:41:51]: But then you get all the other parts, like the Geosynergic Minds, which exist to manage geophysics, meteorology and ecology to keep things globally optimal, rather than locally optimal; you've got the Immunities, which are exactly what it says on the tin; you've got Transfinity, the Teleic Mind, which is working on the very long-term problem of turning the Transcend's imperatives into hard-coded natural law and thereby desucking the universe, and so on and so forth.
23:39
[word of god on technicalities at 12/18/2018 06:52:46]: Everyone who is running the soul-shard software as part of their mind.
23:39
[word of god on technicalities at 12/18/2018 06:53:57]: (And can connect to the network reasonably often, I suppose.)
23:40
[word of god on technicalities at 12/18/2018 07:01:36]: As I said a couple of years back, this, of course, is peculiarly applicable to the Eldraeverse in explaining both their identification of entropy and evil, and in quite why so many people and organizations in the Empire are quite so comfortable “playing God”. Someone has to, they might very well say, on the grounds that if anyone does hold that post already, the prevalence of this sort of thing in the universe demonstrates clearly – even before we bring up minor issues like the inescapable cosmic force of decay, belike – that the present incumbent is incompetent, insane, or quite simply monstrous.
23:40
[word of god on technicalities at 12/18/2018 07:00:07]: “I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. “As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. “And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
23:40
[word of god on technicalities at 12/18/2018 07:03:29]: Their version of the problem of evil isn't "how do we justify this, assuming an omnibenevolent god", it's "Since evil exists, how do we kill it? (Note: not just the individual instances, but the entire class that defines them.)"
23:41
[word of god on technicalities at 12/20/2018 16:44:20]: Side note: there's a rather nasty failure mode of muonic-deuterium "warm fusion" reactors. If the EM containment fails on a regular fusion reactor, the plasma expands, hits the reactor vessel, and immediately quenches with the only casualty being the lining. If you're using muonic deuterium, since electrons and muons don't Pauli-exclude each other, the uncontained muonic plasma passes right through the reactor vessel as if it wasn't there, and the surrounding environment may regret it.
23:42
[word of god on technicalities at 12/20/2018 16:47:05]: It's been done experimentally, but the more conventional D/3He reactors were up and running nicely before practical muon-fu was a thing. There are probably people considering it as a way to get 4xH fusion over the ignition hump, but it's not a huge priority since no-one's running out of D/3He any time soon.
23:42
[word of god on technicalities at 12/20/2018 16:52:36]: Well, probably not as bad as a hydrogen bomb, since for the same reasons as it can pass through the containment, you're not going to have the same pressure-wave effects - or rather, they'll be spread out according to whatever the decay curve of artificially stabilized muons is - and we're not talking about prompt criticality anyway. On the other hand, the muonic plasma will be right there radiating heat. It's not going to take any longer to quench than a regular fusion plasma in a frigid "normal" environment for the usual reasons, but you still really don't want to be in the reactor room when it's happening.
23:42
[word of god on technicalities at 12/20/2018 16:55:34]: So, what I expect you would get is very similar to what happens if you blow a hole in the side of a regular fusion reactor: the air in the reactor room gets superheated, so you have a big ol' flashover that wrecks the immediate area and hopefully is contained by the nearest pressure bulkhead, leaving behind a lot of rusted mess.
23:43
[word of god on technicalities at 12/20/2018 17:06:53]: Greenlife and bluelife are fairly close cousins (both DNA-based, using proteins, lipids, and sugars, although with a different coding and somewhat different set of amino acids), which is what made it possible to integrate them. And enough that heterotrophs and saprotrophs of each could mostly-consume the other, although they'd both be missing out on some essential nutrients if they tried to survive off it. (Although it was a ridiculously huge sign to eldraeic biochemists saying YOU ARE NOT A NATURAL SPECIES.)
23:44
[word of god on technicalities at 12/20/2018 17:09:40]: Silverlife mostly does its own thing, because being evolved from Precursor nanites, it's not even close biologically to the others. Interactions there are limited to a few weird diseases like the silver plague, which is what happens when you're infected by nanites that start stripping the metals out of your blood and tissues.
23:44
[word of god on technicalities at 12/20/2018 17:19:22]: Looking just at the gross internal differences: well, apart from the Precursors replacing our red cells with free-floating organic catalysts (taken from bluelife, because they were more efficient than hemoglobin), a quick MRI is going to point out the different bone and muscle structures (interwoven, and braided, respectively), the double-chambered stomach, the six-lobed liver, the peristaltic heart, and the whole paracardiac chain that doesn't even exist in humans.
23:44
[word of god on technicalities at 12/20/2018 17:23:04]: It's a bunch of folded layers along the venae cavae responsible for blood filtration and housing a bunch of subsidiary glands and ganglia; most of which are part of the sort of enhanced immune and self-repair systems you need in order to, well, not die.
23:48
[word of god on technicalities at 01/04/2019 23:12:09]: [species pop distribution/how many eldrae] Okay, to toss out a proctonumerological approximation, you can assume that they’re maybe 30-35% of the population. Another 60% or so is made up of the other homeworld-included species and uplifts. The rest are immigrants from elsewhere.
23:48
[word of god on technicalities at 01/04/2019 23:16:17]: (The not-mentioning-species - although it is often determinable from the names - is of course deliberate. In a culture like theirs, people think of the individual first, the chosen-groups second, and the demographic third and last.)
23:49
[word of god on technicalities at 01/06/2019 07:36:59]: [simulation hypothesis] There's not a solid consensus. It is one of the interpretations which information physics - the "it is bit" version of ontoscience - leads to, but in the absence of falsifiability, the majority prefers to invoke the local equivalent of Occam's Razor and go with the interpretation which suggests that the informational universe isn't software running on hardware; it's an algorithm which can compute itself without need for substrate, as if the cells of a cellular automaton were also its hardware.
23:50
[word of god on technicalities at 01/06/2019 07:38:45]: This, of course, hasn't stopped the Epistemological Threats chaps (EPOCH SHATTER) from running a number of projects designed to try to hack their way out of the simulation, timing channel attacks on particle interactions and suchlike.
23:50
[word of god on technicalities at 01/06/2019 07:46:07]: (In context, if you recall https://eldraeverse.com/2015/10/01/beyond-this-horizon/ for a dose of speculative what's-in-between-universes handwavium, the information physics people would say that those long-term stable agglomerations of entities that we call universes? What makes them long-term stable agglomerations is that they're shaped like algorithms that compute themselves. To use a bunch of metaphor to gloss over the underlying processes, they continually define themselves as what they Are, so unlike the rest of the churning all-set, they're resistant to being told they Are Not.)
Alistair Young
Beyond This Horizon
The cacoastrum of the embedding empyrean, in information physics, can best be defined as the all-set. As the all-set it contains in potentia all entities, including all rules by which all entities â€Š
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23:50
[word of god on technicalities at 01/06/2019 07:54:11]: ((This is of course all wildly speculative even in-universe, where there are three major theories governing the realms of fundamentals where ontotechnologists get to play, all of which have been partially verified. The situation on the ground is like trying to reconcile QM and general relativity with only a modest understanding of either, only it's a three-way with extra headache sauce.)
23:52
[word of god on technicalities at 01/06/2019 08:08:23]: Only insofar as the timeline has a final entry to the effect of “Estimated Date of Omnipotence, (per consensus of late night futurist drunken bullshitting sessions)”.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/04/2019 12:01 AM
[word of god on technicalities at 05/23/2019 22:56:54]: [bionics] Enh, the most likely limiting factors are probably energy consumption and thermal management. But I cannot help but think that spending too much time and effort accounting for this sort of thing -and, to a certain extent, excessive concern for balance in general - rather goes against the awesome-people-being-awesome genre.
00:01
[word of god on technicalities at 05/23/2019 22:59:09]: So I say let people turn themselves into walking tanks if they want to. The "balance" for that is that you're weirdly overspecialized, have probably traded away enough abilities (like most of your sense of touch) that your life isn't actually that enjoyable any more, and made the world stereotype you as "unsubtle, unimaginative thug who shouldn't be invited to any of the good parties".
00:01
[word of god on technicalities at 05/23/2019 23:01:57]: (Also, to really reflect the genre, INT, WIS, and cycles-per-second-accessible are your killer stats. Mister walking-tank-guy should therefore expect to be pwned hard by someone who spent more money on processor time and less on looking badass to people who've watched too many bad movies.)
00:03
[word of god on technicalities at 05/23/2019 23:45:47]: There's a reason I talk about nanocyborgs. That's because there is basically nothing that your stereotypical cyberpunk chromeboy can do that can't be done better by (a) a drone, or (b) a suit. And the latter has the distinct advantage that you can take it off .
00:05
[word of god on technicalities at 05/25/2019 04:58:39]: @o11o1 Bear in mind that the distinction between hardware and software isn't nearly as clear-cut as it might seem. Look at things like FPGAs, for example, or processor microcode. Or, going the other way around, that neural networks can be implemented in software.
00:05
[word of god on technicalities at 05/25/2019 04:59:37]: The software of the brain is stored in the configuration of its hardware, but that's no more than saying that it's a curious architecture in which the "CPU" and the "hard drive" happen to be the same component.
00:09
[word of god on technicalities at 05/25/2019 05:10:17]: I mean, you're not wrong in the main point - there are adaptation periods, and "driver"-type mindpatches to make adaptation easier. and a whole bunch of novel dysmorphia syndromes, not to mention the infamous zero-day flu that comes up every time a service pack comes out.
00:09
[word of god on technicalities at 05/25/2019 05:27:02]: So, closed timelike curves, Turing oracles, anything that can handle noncomputable reals, computers that can complete infinite steps in finite time, hypothetical quantum computers that can use an infinite superposition of states, other assorted weirdness like that.
00:09
[word of god on technicalities at 05/25/2019 05:25:20]: Turing oracles? Yeah, anything that can solve the GHP is a hypercomputer.
00:09
[word of god on technicalities at 05/25/2019 05:27:36]: So, y'know, one of those situations in which time travel is actually the most easily realizable solution. 😄
00:10
[word of god on technicalities at 05/25/2019 05:32:38]: So the operating cycle of an ALP is 1. Receive an answer from the future. 2. Check if it is correct. 3. If and only if it is correct, transmit it to the past and then output it. Otherwise, transmit a random answer instead. Since the universe can't be inconsistent, this algorithm will always output correct answers.
00:10
[word of god on technicalities at 05/25/2019 05:34:09]: (This looks like you're getting something for nothing; presumably the cost of the computation is extracted by whatever mechanism enforces chronological consistency, but the deep physics is, um, not yet effed.)
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Cyfnos BOT 06/04/2019 4:19 PM
[word of god on random at 12/01/2017 16:45:44]: From the living in the future files from back in March: the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project has made synthetic, trimmed-and-optimized versions of one-third of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome, and so far they work perfectly when swapped into the yeast cells.
16:19
[word of god on random at 12/01/2017 16:45:47]: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6329
Science: 355 (6329)
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16:20
[word of god on random at 12/05/2017 06:39:25]: For a good fictive treatment of the dangers of AI oracles, I must recommend this to your attention:
16:20
[word of god on random at 12/05/2017 06:39:52]: (The always-worth-reading Anders Sandberg once again knocks it out of the park.)
16:20
[word of god on random at 12/05/2017 06:41:35]: (You will also recognize the parent of the basilisk-in-a-box problem. I steal from the best. 😄 )
16:21
[word of god on random at 12/13/2017 18:51:41]: The cynical Imperials would point out that the reason is the same, too. If you hard-code a single-minded directive into an AI, you get a paperclip maximizer. If you regulate a "must maximize quarterly shareholder value" directive onto corporations, you get share price maximizers. And in either case, that's when people get to roll their eyes and declare that it's just the traditional end-user lament.
16:21
[word of god on random at 12/13/2017 18:52:19]: "It's just what I asked for, but not what I want!"
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Cyfnos BOT 06/04/2019 6:05 PM
[word of god on random at 01/25/2018 20:47:57]: Hypothesis: in terms of being a vital precursor to cooperation and civilization in general, and demonstrating great advantage even to prosophonts, friendship actually is a sufficiently advanced technology. Zeroth-Singularitarian, even.
18:07
[word of god on random at 01/29/2018 03:33:28]: And, yes, Underside is just like Upperside. Remember, it’s “flat” for values of “really, really, really oblate spheroid”.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/04/2019 6:24 PM
[word of god on random at 03/05/2018 17:45:46]: In the 'verse, for example, "post-scarcity" is basically economist's jargon for "price levels have fallen to a point minuscule relative to income".
18:25
[word of god on random at 03/05/2018 17:50:49]: Post-scarcity, to be meaningful, applies to goods, not collections of goods. If you can get all you want with < epsilon effect on your P&L, it's a post-scarcity good.
18:28
[word of god on random at 03/26/2018 00:35:49]: @Zarpaulek Vargr governments tend not to be democratic in form, but tend to be democratic in practice. The best summary of this I've seen is that humans care a lot about legitimacy, and less about charisma; whereas for Vargr, it's very much the other way around. The relevant upshot of which is that Vargr rarely think there's much point in democratic forms, inasmuch as if you don't have the charisma to keep your dudes following you, they'll all have found someone else to follow anyway by the time the election comes around. The upshot of which is that Vargr governments all tend to look like monarchies or dictatorships or small oligarchies, but in practice, leaders change whenever the leader fails to be sufficiently leader-y; which is arguably more democratic than most democracies.
18:28
[word of god on random at 03/26/2018 00:38:44]: (This is something I've thought about a fair bit in my own worldbuilding context, inasmuch as one of the most important skillsets for an eldraeic runér is the ability to keep the people of your fief sufficiently impressed with your awesomeness as to deem you worth listening to. If you fail at that, then you may still have your formal powers, but other than those, you ain't leading no-one but jack and shit. And Jack left town.)
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Cyfnos BOT 06/04/2019 6:37 PM
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 18:29:09]: For the ‘verse, the answer to what crime looks like is “Like an episode of Leverage , only with more shiny things, and complexity.”
18:37
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 18:29:34]: Because you have to be that good to get anywhere .
18:38
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 18:36:23]: [cyber-style bionic weapons] Technically, you can do some of it, but it’s not going to count as concealed by any means. High-energy power sources, etc., aren’t subtle.
18:38
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 18:38:01]: Also, in this setting, one of the bigger constraints on weapons design is heat dissipation. So unless you want to be walking around with a couple of thermal clips plugged into each arm, firing your fancy energy weapon is likely to be accompanied by the scent of delicious roasting long pork.
18:38
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 18:45:37]: That kind of heavy cybernetics isn’t much in favor for a variety of reasons, from fashion, to the pain in the ass it is to need to take a trip back into the vat to upgrade, to the difficulty of avoiding losing functionality elsewhere because bodies are kind of tightly packed. It’s by no means unknown, but it’s not usually considered the advantageous route.
18:38
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 18:47:58]: (And the two maneuvers widely taught for “unarmed” PK-combat are the less-lethal pinch the carotid artery shut, and the most-lethal crush your heart in your chest.)
18:38
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 18:51:34]: Also, if you’re looking for minimizing time-on-target, you don’t want to have to futz about with limb positioning. Get yourself a little hovering killdrone that can spin in place and whack the target before the meat can twitch.
18:38
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 19:01:27]: (Small will always tend to maneuver faster than big, by way of physical constraints, but most importantly, doesn't have to worry about getting in its own way.)
18:39
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 19:06:18]: 1. Probably not going to be all that externally invisible. You'll need a firing port, for one thing, unless you like serious injury every time you shoot, plus access to reload, maintain, and whatever else you don't feel like a trip into the vat for. Plus whatever you do for thermal dissipation (and where quick-extrude nanofibers are concerned, that means you now have an arm with a bunch of red-hot wires puncturing it).
18:39
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 19:07:35]: And while you may still make it invisible to the Mk. 1 non-kinesics-trained eyeball, how many of those do you ezpect to meet on the way to the firefight?
18:39
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 19:10:34]: 2. Semiotically, unlike the traditional openly-carried sidearm which carries the message "I am a responsible citizen-shareholder who stands ready to protect your rights and my own", concealed weapons carry a message more along the lines of "I am an incompetent assassin or someone here to start some shit."
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[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 19:12:25]: 3. Your arm is a tightly-packed mass of nanobiotechnological wonders. What capabilities are you willing to trade away?
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[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 19:16:58]: (Coincidentally, it happens to be assassins who use this sort of thing, by hiding a tiny single-shot derringer inside a finger-bone that's expected to be a dense diamondoid lattice, or suchlike. But that's intended to kill soft targets up close and personal, and won't do you any good in an actual firefight.)
18:39
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 19:20:34]: On biomimetics: there's an arms race between sensors and stealth, and in this arena, sensors are winning. Fooling one sense is easy; foiling five is possible; faking out eighteen or so is a Very Hard Problem, despite the billions of esteyn the media industry throws at it every year.
18:39
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 19:22:00]: You're think too large. Nanocytes and nanosomes, that's where the action is.
18:39
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 19:33:35]: Well, you're going to impair your strength (that fancy braided biomyomer), proprioception (interrupting the locicyte and communicyte grids), dexterity (both of the above), resistance to damage (replacing hardened bones, compatibility with skin weave) and self-repair (the grids and local artificial lymph nodes), if you're replacing skin you're going to need to replace and integrate some extremely enhanced bionano sensors to avoid degrading sensory acuity, there are some interface connection points engineered into the fingers, and that's just off the top of my head. If I was at home with my notes instead of halfway up a mountain right now, I could probably find a few more in my alpha baseline list.
18:40
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 19:39:24]: By and large, there are issues if you want to fit m+n into the same volume as m, even before you start looking at capabilities. And, y'know, sure, throw enough money and effort at the problem, it's assuredly soluble. The question from their perspective is "is it worth solving"?
18:40
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 19:41:59]: And when they look at it, what they see is a way to expend all that money and effort in exchange for... a poorly-concealed gun they can't put down, in a social context where no-one would care or probably even notice if you just strapped one to your hip.
18:40
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 19:43:33]: (It also raises the question of why, if you're expecting a firefight, you're wandering around in a naked squishie, anyway, rather than putting on armor or wearing a combat clankie.)
18:40
[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 19:52:55]: (Also, because sometimes unplanned firefights happen. But all but a statistically insignificant fraction of the trillion or so sidearms out there have never been fired in anger and probably never will be.)
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[word of god on random at 05/20/2018 20:01:02]: Or, to sum up for next time, semiotics and cultural habit work to ensure that people keep picking up their pistol along with their wallet and car keys, as it were. It's a low-effort thing for an epsilon probability, cultural stigma aside. I don't think they work to justify turning yourself into an inefficient combat cyborg just in case. (Analogy from here: plenty of women keep a pistol in their purse against the possibility of an attack, but very few if any join militias and train in the woods on weekends.)
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Cyfnos BOT 06/04/2019 6:54 PM
[word of god on random at 06/15/2018 18:32:27]: On occasion, and usually with the concurrence of the Presidium when someone has turned out to be a bunch of reason-immune asshats and nothing but returning them to the stone age and hoping their next go at civilization works out better is left. Intentional genocide is, of course, very much illegal by all the laws of war. On the other hand, like we said back here ( https://eldraeverse.com/2014/05/04/trope-a-day-genocide-dilemma/ ), if people are dumb enough to keep attacking you until you've self-defensed them to death, that's not intentional genocide, now is it? That's just the polity-level version of suicide by cop.
Alistair Young
Trope-a-Day: Genocide Dilemma
Genocide Dilemma: The remarkably cynical view of the Conclave of Galactic Polities on this particular issue is that, yes, genocide is wrong and very, very illegal.  On the other hand, some species,

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18:54
[word of god on random at 06/15/2018 18:36:13]: On the other hand, by far the majority of the Worlds' serious problem children are comfortably handled by wrapping an englobement grid around their planet(s) and letting them think happy-happy thoughts to themselves for the rest of ever, or at least until someone feels like peeking under the grid to see if they're ready to play nice. Or have blown themselves up in the interim, of course - dogmatic non-cooperators usually aren't all that good at cooperating with themselves, either.
18:55
[word of god on random at 06/16/2018 12:22:46]: @Archon In fairness to them, it is sort-of a dualist position - it's just not Cartesian mind-body dualism, or particularly analogous to it, because it doesn't assert any non-physicalism. It just claims that the representation isn't identical to the represented. (For myself, I call it "information dualism", which is an excessively high-falutin' name for the realization that Vignettes of the Star Empire is the content of the book, not the specific ink and paper of a particular instance; or that when you move a file across drives - i.e., by copy-and-delete - you still have the file , for all that it's being stored in a completely different set of magnetic domains.)
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Cyfnos BOT 06/04/2019 7:03 PM
[word of god on random at 07/13/2018 19:45:08]: Hey, voluntary actual death, which includes choosing tor remain dead, or other identity-abolishing transitions while bound by contract is definitely straight-up wilful breach.
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[word of god on random at 07/13/2018 19:45:54]: Likewise, transition to infomorph if you're under contract to remain corporeal for whatever reason.
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[word of god on random at 07/13/2018 19:46:59]: Well, technically, if you're body's killed by external causes and you don't have current incarnation insurance, that can qualify as an involuntary breach.
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[word of god on random at 07/13/2018 19:48:38]: Much as our mortgage lenders want you to have insurance cover that pays them off if you find yourself unable, the lack of which is a breach, a lot of lenders, etc., there want to be damn sure that you'll come back and fulfil your half of the agreement.
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[word of god on random at 07/13/2018 19:49:34]: Well, they'll get the Court of Claims to issue an injunction to drag your ass out of the afterlife, the costs being added to your bill.
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[word of god on random at 07/13/2018 19:50:13]: Death will, fairly notoriously, not release you.,
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[word of god on random at 07/13/2018 19:59:48]: Actually, Imperial bankruptcy law is very generous by our standards (even more so than Texas, which is the best place in the world to go bankrupt that I'm aware of). The inalienable property you get to keep (unless the equity in it currently belongs to a lender), no questions asked, includes: * The citizen-shareholder’s primary body and/or server, whether owned or purchased as a service. * The citizen-shareholder’s primary domicile and furnishings for same, up to the limits of a basic claim set out in the Homestead Act. * The citizen-shareholder’s tort insurance, health insurance, and incarnation insurance. * One set of personal weapons for the citizen-shareholder’s defense. * One personal vehicle. * Clothing (including jewelry) not to exceed 25% of total inalienable property. * The tools of, and other required equipment for, the citizen-shareholder’s trade. * The citizen-shareholder’s library, including at least one computational and telecommunicative device. * Food, necessary medical equipment, and other sustenance.
19:04
[word of god on random at 07/13/2018 20:01:23]: That's not a right , of course, but "a courtesy extended between citizen-shareholders", it being in everyone's enlightened self-interest to leave people in a situation where they can get their life back together and become productive again, because doing so promotes risk-taking, entrepreneurship, and general acts of being awesome that are, on the whole, more profitable all around.
19:04
[word of god on random at 07/13/2018 20:07:44]: Yeah, it's one of those difficult situations to get yourself into. On the other hand... bankruptcy is not quite so generally available, because of that "courtesy between citizen-shareholders" thing. If you ended up needing it through entrepreneurial failure, say, or force majeure , or other such things, and have shown previous willingness to try to repay your debts before resorting to it, then the Court of Claims will award it to you easily. On the other hand, if you ended up in that situation because you blew through your inheritance and borrowed funds on blackjack, hookers, and blow, and then come seeking relief, the Court of Claims will indenture your ass for the next eight centuries scraping muck out of biowaste reclamation pools, because courtesies only go so far.
19:05
[word of god on random at 07/13/2018 21:06:38]: Billed to an estate, certainly, although in the modern day "passed onto heirs" is just something debt collectors use to prey on the grieving who may not know any better.
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[word of god on random at 07/13/2018 21:07:39]: (In the 'verse, of course, while your estate is liable for outstanding debts, it's definitely not passed on to anyone, not even a spouse. You can't obligate anyone but yourself.)
19:05
[word of god on random at 07/13/2018 21:25:51]: Yeah, but it's not automatic. It's basically the same case - your spouse isn't liable for anything you bought in your own name, but if you both signed the paperwork on a car you bought for both of you, you're jointly liable. Likewise, if you bought it for the corporation, or jointly with the corporation (if you had signing authority for it), it's jointly liable, but it's not liable for anything you bought in your own name.
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[word of god on random at 07/13/2018 21:27:32]: All of which amounts to "you can't inherit someone else's debt; but if you were already obligated to that debt - joint debtor, guarantor, whatever - it's now all yours".
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[word of god on random at 07/14/2018 14:38:09]: @Zarpaulek Not quite aurochs, but one of the main greenlife meat-and-milk animals is the quebĂ©rĂșr, which comes off the same branch of the evolutionary tree as the bison, except bigger. (Trison?) Stands about 7.5' tall, 15' long, weights maybe 3,500 lbs. They get to herd those. @Morgrim Moon Most corgi people I know report that they're excellent at herding children. And their parents, for that matter, if they aren't paying attention.
19:05
[word of god on random at 07/14/2018 14:42:11]: And corgis - while not for their size - are exactly the sort of bandal that the Empire's breeders were trying to work towards, because they're so darn clever. Back in the day, there , you'd probably see lots of them working in offices and shops, running memos to the proper recipients, fetching specific items out of the stockroom, that sort of thing.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/05/2019 12:39 AM
[word of god on random at 09/11/2018 18:42:54]: (As a side note, a geologist of my Internet-acquaintance once pointed out that some ores are concentrated by hydrological activity, and that asteroid concentrations of those are, therefore, all crap-grade ore. So there is at least some reason to go on mining certain specialist products from planet surfaces.)
00:39
[word of god on random at 09/11/2018 18:43:04]: (Also, gemstones.)
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[word of god on random at 09/30/2018 14:40:31]: To skip back up a bit and move in-'verse, at some point I really have to write something about the curious memetics behind the widespread adoption of moe anthropomorphism as the preferred user interface/self-representation for animating intelligences.
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[word of god on random at 09/30/2018 14:44:37]: That seems more like the explanation for why the battlecruiser's commander prefers it, rather than why the battlecruiser does. 😃
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[word of god on random at 09/30/2018 14:41:17]: Specifically, by the animating intelligences.
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[word of god on random at 09/30/2018 14:49:20]: Memeticists in general are pretty clear on the whole "mechanimism as a perfectly logical response to an environment filled with smart objects" part; it's just somewhat less clear where the compulsive adorability comes from.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/05/2019 1:21 AM
[word of god on random at 10/01/2018 14:35:06]: @Unknown Metaphysical confusion with regard to the nature of identity. Specifically, that it doesn't follow mathematical equivalence, but rather pointer equivalence. i.e., that after executing A = 2 ; B = A ; (A != B) is true because ("A" != "B") .
01:21
[word of god on random at 10/01/2018 14:40:39]: Or to go with a different computing metaphor, that after fork(2) executes but before it returns, there's a meaningful intrinsic distinction between the two resulting processes. (I say internal because one of them has the same arbitrary label - pid - as the "parent" process, but that's an external label the kernel uses to track 'em and not something intrinsic to the process. fork(2) could just as easily have been written to throw out the old pid and give both resulting processes new ones.)
01:23
[word of god on random at 10/18/2018 14:40:53]: @KRKIIIIIIIIIIII You aren't wrong: when someone there says "constitutional law", what they mean is the Fundamental Contract, the Imperial Charter, and a couple of minor binding legal principles like the Antirecursion Principle that were elevated to that status de facto .
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[word of god on random at 10/18/2018 14:42:45]: (Of course, it's treated rather more seriously than most are here , due to the substantially higher likelihood of people who think of constitutional law as something to interpret your way around being thrown off waterfalls. 😎 )
01:23
[word of god on random at 10/18/2018 14:51:57]: In locations we have not seen yet: "Senator's Walk". It's a riverside quay just upstream of the big falls in the capital (not the historic ones, but what the hell, falls are falls). It's a lovely place for a quiet walk, it's got little cafes and mathom stores, and comfortable places to sit and think, and is actually quite popular with the folks from the governance district. ...but it was built and named, back in the day, by a chap who figured a little pointed reminder wouldn't hurt.
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[word of god on random at 10/18/2018 15:11:03]: [antirecursion principle] The one that says you can't use the powers granted by a law to modify it, or to modify legislation relating to the body that passed the granting law.
01:24
[word of god on random at 10/18/2018 15:11:58]: So, for example, a local executive can't use emergency powers to modify the Emergency Powers Act, or to prevent the Senate (which passed it) from sitting, or to prevent the local assembly that authorized his use of them from sitting, either.
01:24
[word of god on random at 10/18/2018 15:13:23]: Or, in the case of the Charter, it's the principle that says you can't use any of the executive or legislative powers granted by the Charter to modify the Charter.
01:24
[word of god on random at 10/19/2018 00:47:07]: Ah, actually, @MarcusAurelius , it's just the opposite. There's a limited amendment mechanism in Section I, Article IV, and a list of things that it can't amend in Section I, Article V. Defining that is okay by the Antirecursion Principle, because it's creating the power to modify itself and defining exactly how it can happen. What the A. P. says is that none of the various assorted powers the Charter delegates can be used to modify it, because they're dependent on it to exist in the first place.
01:24
[word of god on random at 10/19/2018 00:51:47]: (A similar principle is why there isn't, for example, a pardon power there, because a crime violates one right or another of at least one citizen-shareholder, and all the powers of the Empire are based on a delegation of sovereign power from the individual citizen-shareholders. The Empire can't, therefore, pardon a crime against someone because no individual citizen-shareholder has the right to pardon a crime against anyone else in their own right, and so can't delegate what they don't have.)
01:24
[word of god on random at 10/19/2018 00:58:16]: Or, on another note, going beyond even the Charter: while unlikely, it would theoretically be possible in many systems to, say, legalize theft or even murder. The Empire can't, not even by amending the Charter. The only thing that gives legislation force is the Charter, and the only thing that gives the Charter force is the Contract, and the Contract just defines the implicit-in-the-nature-of-sophonts rights to life, liberty, property, and contract. If you try to go against any of those, you're invalidating the whole chain of dependencies that you're relying on.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/05/2019 1:39 AM
[word of god on random at 10/25/2018 20:50:55]: I have a nice simple one in project CYSTIC VELOCITY.
01:39
[word of god on random at 10/25/2018 20:51:55]: Essentially, a fluid-borne virus which reprograms cells to create tumors made up of, ‘hem, semi-stable nitrogenous compounds.
01:39
[word of god on random at 10/25/2018 20:52:37]: When poked sufficiently to trigger said instability, the resulting detonation spreads the fluids wonderfully.
01:40
[word of god on random at 10/25/2018 20:53:03]: Got lotsa nitrogen in most oxygen-breathers.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/05/2019 1:52 AM
[word of god on random at 12/14/2018 06:26:10]: [cancer] It wasn't that much of a problem even before artificial immune systems were a thing, unless it went metastatic. If you're going to live forever, your immune system has to have some way to kick the ass of wannaneoplasms before they start getting problematic. And living on a world with more power metals in the crust and so more background radiation only multiplies the effect.
01:52
[word of god on random at 12/14/2018 06:29:22]: (At least for small critters. Turns out that while some of the biggest whales get cancer, they basically never die from cancer, because before a tumor can grow big enough to kill them, the tumor itself develops tumors which kill it . Cancer cells being more or less defined by sucking at cooperation, and all.)
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Cyfnos BOT 06/05/2019 9:10 AM
[word of god on random at 01/04/2019 22:17:08]: On earlier points: 1. Replacing your body if it is accidentallied is what incarnation insurance is for. There are no freebies, inasmuch as "freebie" is short for "make someone else pay for it". (If you bought cheap incarnation insurance, it may only cover bringing you back as an infomorph, and if you bought no incarnation insurance, then you're stuck hoping that some generous soph will pay to have you brought out of dead storage. So keep up your incarnation cover, folks.) 2. You don't have an automatic right to replace anything that someone else has to make for you, obviously. On the other hand, unless you're running around in a body that's a copyrighted artistic work (and less than 144 years old) or a hand-build custom job, it is very likely that you bought a perpetual license and need only call the local fab shop. (Or your incarnation insurer will do so.) 3. Even if you are an exception to the above, there are plenty of body hotels out there renting out inexpensive vatjobs of a variety of common clades, because if you just need to take a quick meeting on an outer-system moon one afternoon, it's a bit precious to send, grow, and dispose of the details of your very own small intestine, etc., just for that. 4. "doesn't treat bodies as opportunistic mobility plattforms" Er, who said? Most people tend to stick to one primary body or primary body design, certainly, because it's theirs , and thus comfortable, the same way most people prefer to live in their own houses, drive their own cars, use their own computers, and wear their own pants. But that doesn't stop anyone from renting a vatjob for a day trip, or a specialized body for a specialized purpose.
09:12
[word of god on random at 01/04/2019 22:29:08]: [non-perpetual licenses to fab] It’s basically the physical-property version of pay-per-view, and no-one wants that either.
09:12
[word of god on random at 01/04/2019 22:32:41]: Also — “discontinued” in general is a tricky concept when most companies don’t do their own manufacturing. You’re usually buying a recipe and a license to fab from it, and at the end of the copyright period, the former goes into the public knowledge pool and the latter stops being needed.
09:12
[word of god on random at 01/04/2019 22:38:05]: Although - one of the reasons these tend to be perpetual licenses is that you’re paying for all the fancy personalization work that overlays your personal genome-bits on the generic class template, which is the up-front cost of most bodies. (That doesn’t hit the public domain; just the generic template. People can’t clone you freely after 144 years.)
09:12
[word of god on random at 01/04/2019 23:19:46]: The big entry on that list are cikrieth lifestylers and fusions-of-self. Even though they’re all technically peer forks, it’s easier to keep synched with yourself if you keep an authoritative version on a high-bandwidth server cluster somewhere.
09:12
[word of god on random at 01/04/2019 23:21:40]: As a bonus, that one of you can take over all the computationally-intensive, infomorph-friendly background tasks.
09:14
[word of god on random at 01/05/2019 07:50:29]: And @Morgrim Moon is closest, here - most people who don't have special requirements are getting a package when they get incarnation insurance that includes backup storage. But whether they do or not, it's usually your incarnation insurer that takes care of orchestrating all the legal and practical steps in between "pick up your stack/notification of irrecoverability from the paramedics' file room" and "you walk out the door in a fresh new body", along with all the permutations which may include things like "hiring a soul-repo agent to go fish your stack out of the middle of a war zone/a pile of radioactive rubble on a fossil world halfway between archaeology and eschatology/Don Meningo's fish tank". One way or another, you need someone or someorg or something to do that for you, 'cause it can't do itself.
09:15
[word of god on random at 01/12/2019 18:06:37]: "I tend to assume that the Borg were the product of a poorly thought-through attempt at collective consciousness design, and like various other big engineering-fu in the posthuman project, it's something you have to get right the first time , 'cause you don't get any second chances. Specifically, they turned up the feedback gain way too high. By which I mean - well, the killer app of a collective consciousness is that it can consider problems from millions of different viewpoints, and in millions of different ways, then integrate and disseminate the results, so every problem it encounters can be matched with the exact right set of minds to have the perfect insights to handle it, and so forth. But the Borg collective overwrites its fed-back personality onto every drone. Sure, this helps it with assimilating the unwilling - which might have been the point of turning it up that high, although that might be crediting the designers too much, and anyway, a self-respecting collective consciousness should be able to easily recruit like this : http://angryflower.com/349.html - but it cripples it as a mind. All it can hear are the same thoughts repeated back billions of times. It thinks it's perfect and beautiful because it's echoing its single perspective back to itself in a self-reinforcing positive feedback cycle. As for tech superiority - it's crippled there, too, which is why a bunch of Luddites like the anti-genetics, anti-AI, anti-transhumanism etc. Federation can reliably defeat them. It can't carry out that killer app. It can compensate for its design flaws somewhat because it does have the ability to do massively-parallel processing across billions of drones, but it's trying to innovate with billions of minds all of which think in almost exactly the same way. An individuality-preserving collective would kick its ass up one spiral arm and down the other."
09:15
[word of god on random at 01/12/2019 18:08:17]: With a side note on their adapting to weapons: "Still: brainpower of trillions, and their top plan for dealing with phasers is to keep charging at them until one of them figures out how not to die? None of the collective concluded that just maybe it might be better to, oh, use their fancy through-shields teleportation to steal a couple of the Enterprise's weapons, then go away and come back in a couple of days having used their advantage in brains to completely analyze the technology, run a few billion simulations of the underlying physics, and develop Immunity to Freakin' Everything You Have Developed Or Might Develop Any Time Soon Using These Principles? (My main complaint here is that the Borg should have been so much scarier than they were portrayed as, as a posthuman hive mind. Even narratively speaking alone, they were set up as the antithesis to the Federation, which would work so much better if they used the hive-mind advantages that go directly against the Feds anti-augmentation principles.)"
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Cyfnos BOT 06/05/2019 9:27 AM
[word of god on random at 01/27/2019 02:42:47]: Y'know, it probably wasn't sapiens . Given the timing of the earliest remains on Eliéra and some reasonable assumptions about distances and Precursor drive tech, we could be looking at neanderthalis , heidelbergensis , maybe even denisova . Probably not far enough into the past to be antecessor , erectus , or anything earlier.
09:28
[word of god on random at 01/27/2019 02:53:58]: And all that uplifting and engineering was significant in terms of degree of alteration. Which in a hypothetical scenario where someone gets to do the relevant science is going to confuse people - despite appearances, the Eldrae alathis genome is probably no more similar to ours than that of, say, dogs. Down in the eighty-some zone.
09:28
[word of god on random at 01/27/2019 03:08:24]: Eldrae alathis is the baseline; E. anthalis was the once-speciated transsophont upgrade standard (with the added technosome pairs); E. kirsunar is the post-Transcend full-nanocyborg version.
09:29
[word of god on random at 01/28/2019 01:28:24]: The only limit on reinstantiation is how many previous backups you’ve got. From last-three-periodics-plus-stack at the minimalist end of the scale all the way up to the obsessive lifeloggers who store snapshots of themselves all through their life. (Storage be cheap, yo.) Not like information decays, y’know.
09:29
[word of god on random at 01/28/2019 01:32:06]: And, yes, one of the reasons war is unpopular among advanced civilizations is the difficulty of actually killing anyone without resorting to extreme measures, since backup providers tend to market based on their multiple resilient off-site backup systems (“291 locations throughout the inner Worlds, and our deep-black cold store!”)
09:34
[word of god on random at 02/01/2019 22:26:28]: Y'know, technically, inasmuch as vector-control in general works by nonlocal momentum transfer, ain't no particular reason that said transfer has to be nonlocal only in space.
09:34
[word of god on random at 02/01/2019 22:27:17]: Technically, you could combine this with a standard acausal oracle to steal the momentum from shots that would have hit you and use it to move yourself out of the way, such that they never would have connected in the first place.
09:34
[word of god on random at 02/01/2019 22:33:37]: This also pairs nicely with the ray shielding system using a wormhole with one end in the relative future, which catches lasers that are going to be fired at you in the future and uses them to fire back at the enemy in the past. Conveniently, by observing through the past end when a laser comes out of it, you can detect exactly where the future end needs to be to catch the laser when it's fired.
09:34
[word of god on random at 02/01/2019 22:34:13]: This, and other "Fuck You, I'm God"-level technologies coming soon to your friendly local merchanter-at-arms...
09:41
[word of god on random at 02/10/2019 22:45:53]: For fictive purposes, incidentally, vaccination is about as compulsory as everything else in the Empire, which is to say, not; but you are legally liable for the costs of any diseases you knowingly or negligently communicate. Which is to say, you don't have to use proper infection control precautions, but you are incentivized to do so - and can pick whichever ones suit you best.
09:41
[word of god on random at 02/10/2019 22:48:39]: You can pick any of the eighty vaccinations on the market, wear a face mask or even an environment suit, stay at home any time you feel even slightly sick, etc., etc., or just precommit to having to pay out a bunch of medical costs and comp to people. Choose anything you like.
09:41
[word of god on random at 02/10/2019 22:52:18]: It's like pollution regulation there . It says that, for example, you mustn't emit dioxin into the atmohydrosphere. Unlike most of ours, they don't care how you go about that: destroy it, use it for something useful, store it in a giant dioxin-ice blob in deep space, whatever. Just that you do it.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/05/2019 11:07 AM
[word of god on random at 03/15/2019 12:26:11]: (Or, as they say in-'verse, "Two sophs meet to fight. Which one wins? The one who brought a clockbow.")
11:07
[word of god on random at 03/15/2019 12:27:18]: (Also told as "The one who brought friends," depending on the moral one's trying to convey. In practice, anyone there expecting to meet a fight on the road will bring several friends, and all of them will be carrying clockbows. 😁 )
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Cyfnos BOT 06/05/2019 11:30 AM
[word of god on random at 03/22/2019 17:14:44]: They don't need to. They have the advantage already. Guns are equalizers in defense. Taking them away doesn't render people harmless, it just tilts the balance of power towards the physically biggest and strongest: coincidentally , all young males in the habit of routine violence. This sucks for everyone else. But in any case, "need" is irrelevant, my desire to issue people who argue based on need one shared shed, water, and gruel each and that alone by way of demonstrating the point. In anything resembling a free society, you can do anything not malum in se .
11:30
[word of god on random at 03/22/2019 17:22:34]: And, not to put too fine a point on it, if the only way you, as a government, can imagine fulfilling your notional responsibility to protect your citizens is to preemptively render them harmless, helpless, and hopeless before anyone who doesn't obey you, then you are grossly incompetent and should be replaced by one that can , or is at least willing to try .
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Cyfnos BOT 06/05/2019 2:13 PM
[word of god on random at 04/12/2019 14:55:25]: (On a perhaps less inflammatory in-'verse note, over in the #shardverses , this is something which our protagonist is very smug about inasmuch as it lets her win a long-standing debate with a League exosophontologist. His hypothesis is that a "virtuous herd" species will naturally have very strong governmental social welfare institutions to ensure that all members of the herd, down to the weakest and smallest, are taken care of. Her hypothesis is that a virtuous herd species will not , on the grounds that for them, having governmental social welfare institutions would be like having a Ministry of Reminding People to Breathe. Equestria quite definitively resolves the dispute in her favor.)
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Cyfnos BOT 06/05/2019 3:38 PM
[word of god on random at 05/06/2019 20:22:04]: Hell, Equestria and the Empire even have the same foreign policy, when you look right at it. "First, try friendship. If that doesn't work out, and if you've given them a second chance, then break out the unstoppable magical superweapons."
15:38
[word of god on random at 05/06/2019 20:25:35]: quietly files away the plans for the Nova-Pumped Harmony Cannon.
15:38
[word of god on random at 05/06/2019 20:25:52]: and other weapons of mass amity
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Cyfnos BOT 06/05/2019 5:19 PM
[word of god on random at 05/27/2019 20:35:11]: Well, first, let's kill off the notion of a counterfactual alternate, because they're not an alternate. They're a completely different person.
17:19
[word of god on random at 05/27/2019 20:36:44]: Second, an agnostic view of the timeline doesn't work (for ethics), because ethics is inherently time-directional.
17:19
[word of god on random at 05/27/2019 20:40:12]: In which the time-directionality of effects is what differentiates contraception from murder, and likewise differentiates not-creation from un-creation/destruction.
17:19
[word of god on random at 05/27/2019 20:40:59]: (This is also observable in 'verse temporal mechanics as the asymmetry between backward and forward time travel.)
17:19
[word of god on random at 05/27/2019 20:43:37]: (Inasmuch as consistency protection binds time travellers to the past, but not time travellers to the future, because the future hasn't happened yet; however, if you travel to the future and then return to your original time, consistency protection now behaves as if you were a traveller to the past. Which you are, because the "latest" moment on your causal graph provides, from a T. M. point of view, an objective definition of "present".)
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Cyfnos BOT 06/05/2019 5:47 PM
[word of god on otherworlds at 12/15/2018 03:01:52]: The kaeth, technically, are closer to saurian-analogs rather than reptile-analogs, so their faces are more motile than lizards'. Their grin is especially well known among people who may not be knowing anything very shortly. That being said, on the one hand, I recommend chromatophores. That being said too, on the other hand, in the 'verse, while there are some cases of near-species being able to learn to read each others' emotive signals (eldrae and dar-bandal, for example), across unrelated species it is by and large much more difficult, especially when those signals may be transmitted in a band that you can't even perceive - even if you know what a dar-cĂșlnĂł means by black-blue-flickerwhite-greenspeckle-black and that you should apologize when the codramaju shifts from baking bread to sour oranges, you couldn't even see mobann! emotion even if you didn't need heavy protective gear to exist in the same place...
17:47
[word of god on otherworlds at 12/15/2018 03:04:24]: Thus, in general, people rely on projecting emoji v-tags letting other people know their emotional state with a standardized vocabulary, and while I usually don't include it as a translation artifact because it would be very hard on readers, people and people's translators tend to speak in the distinctive elcor manner.
17:47
[word of god on otherworlds at 12/15/2018 03:04:28]: ( https://speechevents.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/what-the-elcor-remind-us-about-language/ )
Mark Lewis
What the Elcor remind us about language
“Pleased greeting. Human, it is always good to see your kind.” “Genuine Query. Is there something I can do for you this day?” “With barely contained terror. You drive a hard bargain.” Such is the s

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17:47
[word of god on otherworlds at 12/15/2018 03:04:55]: At least Eldraeic, and therefore Trade, has built-in attitudinal words.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/06/2019 1:18 AM
[word of god on otherworlds at 01/02/2019 22:07:36]: [overkill] "We have a weapon on the drawing board that destroys every point in the universe at every moment along its worldline simultaneously. Does that qualify?" - Eye-in-the-Flame Arms, Ontopathic Weapons Group
01:19
[word of god on otherworlds at 01/02/2019 22:11:15]: Unfortunately, the Ontopathic Weapons Group is having some trouble devising a means of wiping out transfinite realms of extrauniversal chaos in a way that doesn't also leave behind transfinite realms of extrauniversal chaos, chaos being like that.
01:19
[word of god on otherworlds at 01/02/2019 22:11:29]: Research philosophers are on the case!
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Cyfnos BOT 06/06/2019 1:26 AM
[word of god on otherworlds at 01/23/2019 23:44:03]: ANYWAY, I came here to talk about NDB detection.
01:26
[word of god on otherworlds at 01/23/2019 23:45:53]: The remarkably obvious point being that megastructures aren't subtle. Anyone keeping an eye on things with a telescope - and you'd better believe space-age milint outfits own some telescopes - can see what you're up to long before it's even close to complete.
01:26
[word of god on otherworlds at 01/23/2019 23:48:09]: Anywhere within range of an NBD is also plenty close enough to resolve the individual swarm elements, too. If you're building a swarm out of laser projectors, or something that might be them or other suspicious elements, that's more than enough to get a relativistic probe doing a quick fly-by of the construction site to see if you might be Up To Something. No need to wait for a test firing.
01:26
[word of god on otherworlds at 01/23/2019 23:49:39]: And if the probe confirms that, yes, that really is a giant swarm of laser elements, a quick follow-up visit ensues for your neighbors' combined task groups. Or as they call it, OPERATION PREEMPTIVE KERBSTOMP.
01:30
[word of god on otherworlds at 02/12/2019 18:41:46]: Or, for a local proverb: "Good, in the moral sense, is difficult and may be impossible to define objectively. I prefer to concern myself with ethical correctness, which is at least calculable." -- Ianna Quendocius, "Scientific Ethics"
01:33
[word of god on otherworlds at 04/07/2019 05:57:55]: As a side note, when I was putting together the design for the Probable Technologies research crawler, which has the job of poking archaeotech professionally, I was very careful to put some severe limits on its offensive systems, down to things little bigger than sidearms. The reasoning for that being -- well, you recall in the Expanse books how the ring station reacted every time someone got clever ideas that made it feel threatened?
01:33
[word of god on otherworlds at 04/07/2019 05:59:10]: The bright lads at Existential Safety would rather lose a crawler full of field researchers now and again than let them provoke some ancient, paranoid security system into, oh, shooting down the entire expedition ship, or blowing up the sun, or some such overreaction.
01:33
[word of god on otherworlds at 04/07/2019 06:01:59]: They do fit plenty of defensive and running-the-hell-away systems. But with assumptions that - to pick one example - spraying around yourself with antinanitic phlegm is going to be less provocative than laying about you with plasma flamers, which in turn is probably less provocative than popping an EMP, when it comes to nanodefense.
01:33
[word of god on otherworlds at 04/07/2019 06:04:05]: (This policy is mostly informed by the field researchers having backups and anyone going into the vulture-archaeology and god-bothering business pretty much expecting to burn through incarnations pretty fast. On the other hand, the possibilities for paleotech doing Very Bad Things don't get any less compelling just because your field guys are mortal.)
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Cyfnos BOT 06/06/2019 8:10 PM
[word of god on general at 06/07/2019 01:10:31]: It's "packet" as in "packet boat". Packet torpedoes are used for high-speed mail delivery by the Imperial Post, Stellar Express, etc., for even higher speeds than a fast courier. Basically, it's an AKV drive with either or both of a mail safe or a data storage array attached to it.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/06/2019 8:25 PM
[word of god on random at 06/07/2019 01:21:02]: ...one of these days I need to talk some more about contaminated metagrammars and other semiotic weapons. But it is not this day. Anyway, you are very unlikely to be able to intercept or destroy a packet torpedo unless you're absurdly lucky enough to have it pass within your point-defense/CQB range. It's got the drive of an AKV with less mass than the AKV. It'll beat anything but an AKV in a stern chase, and be bloody hard to catch with an AKV unless the geometry is excellent. And ripping along at 60 gravities, have fun trying to get a shooting solution at anything but CQB range.
20:25
[word of god on random at 06/07/2019 01:23:01]: Although, that said, the main thing that keeps hands off packet torpedoes is that if you're lucky, it belonged to the Imperial Post, and you just have to look forward to the IN hunting you down, taking it back, and killing you in the process to remind people not to fuck with the mail.
20:25
[word of god on random at 06/07/2019 01:23:13]: If you're unlucky, it belonged to StellEx.
20:25
[word of god on random at 06/07/2019 01:24:26]: The last people who 'jacked a StellEx mail packet were delivered back to their relatives after StellEx caught them. All their relatives. At the same time.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/06/2019 8:47 PM
[word of god on general at 06/07/2019 01:45:34]: @Ian Bruene While not fully worked out, their werewolf legends are somewhat different, inasmuch as their wolf-equivalents have a friendlier rep even before the Winter of Nightmares and adventures in mutual domestication.
20:47
[word of god on general at 06/07/2019 01:46:58]: Exemplified in the modern day, to give one known example, by the best-selling comic books telling the legend of The Mighty Floof , werewolf superhero.
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Cyfnos BOT 06/21/2019 6:17 PM
[word of god on general at 06/21/2019 23:07:25]: I don't believe it gives details, but essentially it's a form of conditioning that makes them essentially unable to think about disloyalty to their patrons. Pyretic inhibitors are like that. It's essentially a programmed pseudo-conditioned response. Unapproved thought feels like being set on fire, to use a biosapient analogy, which conditions you to shy away from having those thoughts. The longer it continues, the worse it gets. Since it's a programmed response, rather than a genuinely conditioned one, it will intensify to the point at which it kills you well before you can actually break it.
18:17
[word of god on general at 06/21/2019 23:10:40]: Now, this probably seems to you like a tremendously roundabout and inefficient way to build this sort of enslavement system, especially since it leaves death available as an option. That's because it is . It does, however, play to the desires of the sort of sadistic assholes who enjoy forcing their slaves to, basically, break themselves .
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Cyfnos BOT 07/01/2019 12:43 PM
[word of god on general at 07/01/2019 17:22:47]: Super-short version: Because they have ancestry, and because they're useful.
12:43
[word of god on general at 07/01/2019 17:27:32]: The former is just a matter of tracking and goes back well before any sort of civilized times. The latter -- (Side note: recall if you will that for most of your life, a House is a chosen group, not a default group. See https://eldraeverse.com/2015/04/01/adolescence/ CathĂĄl starts out i-sered-RĂ­Ă«lle, "of-the-blood-of", because of descent, but is a dependent of the House, not a member of it. All descent gets you is the right to ask for Acceptance, and is not a guarantee of it. And until Accepted of the House, you don't get to claim the name as your own.)
Alistair Young
Adolescence
CathĂĄl i-sered-RĂ­Ă«lle was nervous, and she tried hard not to let it show. There was no reason to be so, she knew – sure, CathĂĄl, and that’s what all those who failed of Acceptance first time around

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12:43
[word of god on general at 07/01/2019 17:33:58]: - is because it's the first branch that'll admit you. Contrary to the popular misunderstanding of libertarianism, cooperation is important , and indeed, to live in a free society you have to be a lot better at it than if you can make up for its lack with guns and whips. A House is, if you will, at base a mutual-benefit-and-support society. As a member of a House, you've got people who'll watch your back, offer you hospitality, lend you money to start a business or pick yourself up after a disaster, call a lawyer when you need one, care for your children and pets should you get permadead, and a whole initial network to call on. In exchange for the same from you, of course, which is why you have to prove that you can pull your weight to get in, and why there is a procedure to disown those who go to the bad afterwards.
12:43
[word of god on general at 07/01/2019 17:36:10]: You don't have to join the House of your blood, and if you really don't like the notion, you can always disown yourself and go without, but very few have that much of a taste for making their own lives harder.
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Cyfnos BOT 09/27/2019 4:36 PM
[word of god on fanfic at 09/25/2019 19:53:29]: You can - with considerable additional wear and tear - run a cornucopia on what's called "raw-grade feedstock", basically any matter suitably pulverized and suspended in water, but it's hell on efficiency and energy consuption, hard to get elements in poportion, produces lots of ware material, etc., etc.
16:36
[word of god on fanfic at 09/25/2019 19:55:09]: A standard commercial cornucopia, on the other hand, runs on standard-grade (either green or gray) feedstock, which comes to you down a utility pipe, and the waste from which is sent back the same way for reprocessing. Gray, optimized for basic mechanosynthetic applications, contains water, long-chained alcohols, sulphur and nitrogen compounds primarily, with a suspension of iron and copper oxides, heavy metals, silicates, acetates, and prefabricated molecular components, including nanograins of common, reusable industrial plastics, ceramics, and alloys. Green, contrariwise, is for biosynthetic applications.
16:36
[word of god on fanfic at 09/25/2019 19:56:00]: (There are also specialized industrial- and prime-grade feedstocks tailored for specific applications, but those are part of what make autofacs more effective, not something you use at home.)
16:37
[word of god on fanfic at 09/25/2019 19:56:23]: The nanosource is the beginning of this process.
16:37
[word of god on fanfic at 09/25/2019 19:58:24]: Typically, you've got a vaguely organic-looking industrial building that breathes in air, sucks up water from a convenient river, and accepts deliveries of all sorts of different metals and other elements in ingot form, often fresh from the recycler next door; it chews through all of these and pumps out fresh feedstock into the lines.
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