Hi, folks. Not sure what we'll use this for, but nice to see such enthusiasm for it.
18:43
Anyway, just popped in to say that, and deliver the obligatory authorial legal boilerplate:
Since I can never keep track of where ideas come from or in what order, by using this Discord y'all agree that anything resembling an idea mentioned here is mine to freely use, fold, spindle, mutilate, propagate, concentrate, exterminate, write down, and/or publish commercially and also not to sue, defame, or complain overlong to me about it, m'kay?
it's based on the FATE mechanics, the social combat in particular strikes me as suitable http://www.vsca.ca/Diaspora/ Obviously you'd have to ditch the jumpdrive mechanics, but with a little tweaking of the tech levels even the cluster generation is plausible. Maybe change the scale of it to be habitats instead of planets if you wanted to set the game in a particular location
GURPS is the system I favor - and, IMO, a natural fit for firm-to-hard SF settings, although you'd need to adjust things a bit to account for the 'verse's pro-awesomeness bias - but I'd have to acknowledge that the harder you get, the closer it becomes to Death By Mathematics for some folks' taste.
10:25
(And to properly simulate more than a few 'verse characters, you also find yourself having to build 'em on the Holy Crap How Many Points!? standard.)
(Randomly: I watch this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Ok5oxcFng - and I become pretty sure the First Directorate needs a Noodle Incident in which someone was assassinated with a watermelon waterfall.
special agent: "Well, they were there , and it seemed a shame not to use them..."
lead operator: headdeskheaddeskheaddesk )
...Depends on the failure rate of food transport systems, I suppose... (As in, how easily they can make people belief that that Maglev pod spilling all of its food contents on the target was just an accident)(edited)
if your handler is headdesking going "I can't believe you did that", I suspect most of the Worlds will also disbelieve such a crazy thing could happen on purpose.
If you wanted, you could use eclipse phase if you rejigged the tone and dropped the difficulty of everything by a couple notches. I've also heard about a few high-transhumanism RPGs (mindjammer being one), which might be good, but which I haven't read.
Okay, so this a fundamental disagreement then - I love moving parts and overly complex character creation. I don't get to play them much, because not many of my IRL friends agree with me, though. So I might have some untested opinions here and there.
And I know a Fate rpg called Nova Praxis that resembles EP minus the Lovecraft, and with corporate feudalism that runs on a Rep instead of monetary economy.
...Interesting question in that regard: What generates more heat: the firing of very-high-impulse manouvering thrusters/sideburners to dodge a 0.9-and-change cee kinetics coming at you, of the KB or lasers slapping it aside?
I was wondering about that. We know one frigate uses a nuclear-thermal rocket system as the βhotβ deep-space RCS, but that strikes me as not powerful enough for a capital craft thataway of a few million tons, and for dodging 0.9cee projectiles lobbed your way in general (unless I missed a capability of them vector cores to give a starship a boost injection of manouverbility.)(edited)
Then again given theyβre pretty much limited to light speed sensors at combat ranges of a light minute-ish, they probably canβt do much dodging against AKV and other light huggers.
IοΈ must be getting them confused with something else. And yes, if you know the algorithm theyβre not evading. Theyβre telling you where they are.
@MarcusAurelius AKVs come slower than the mass driver rounds in any case (a few hundred to a kilogram at 0.9 cee arenβt getting bested by somethin a few tenthousand times the weight and an imperative not to meld its drive unit); also, you can always push tangle-equipped plattforms out for that sweet, sweet longscan with pseudo-FTL resolution.
that's why I said pretty much. tangle bits are pretty rare IIRC, so you'd likely not see a signicant number expended on a forward sensor platform during a battle
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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00:01
(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. )
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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00:08
(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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00:13
(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.)
Hereβs an idea for tangle bits to write about: The Tangle Courier Service of the Imperial Navy.
Or, probably the most important logistics position after the first fuel and remass tankers, especially for the ships not in the frontier (considering you burn more tangle the more stargates are between you and your com partner.)
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.
...Couldnβt you just deploy tangle relay chains as well? Strikes me as a little more expidient, if logistics-intensive, than waiting the 200-600(?) years itβll take a fresh tangle core com the Core to reach any of the outer regions
If itβs still canon, you can send the pair forward through the gate network to the closest friendly gate to the destination, so at least youβre not hurling the starwisp from the core(edited)
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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00:30
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.
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.
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.(edited)
...How do the Voniensa Republics deal with savant(-like) specimen, by the way, given they seem to detest anything of intelligence that surpasses baseline?
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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00:39
They're fine with savants as long as they're natural-born, genetic engineering being one of the techs on their "ooh, scary" list.
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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00:48
(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.)
But if you do not know how the stargate cores work, it is a little hard to gate information through whatever thingy of hyperspace that keeps the cores connected, I guess.
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.
..Okay, now I am a bit confused: Where did the Propulsion group get their stargates from, then, if they only had a waylforge? And how to they manage to "ram" wormholes large enough for spacecraft transfer (with momentum adjustment as well, I would asume) but not a small keyhole for communication squirts?
"Sufficiently enlightened self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism."
"Sufficiently enlightened self-interest"
To be honest, that is how I would understand altruism in general. It is taking a disadvantage/less advantagous position that helps someone else now, with the goal of a future and/or alternative reward.
"Fair enough. The Republic is basically a giant Star trek reference, so it's quite understandable."
...You know, I never saw the Federation in the Vonies.(edited)
Well, depending on how much the Empire does "You wanna come over to the civilized guys?" But from the Vonie's side, I suspect getting your hands on a starship is a little harder than taking a truck and driving over the DMZ. And you know they're gonna screen anyone who they let into positions to do the equivalent of the above.(edited)
@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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07:47
(They may or may not have found a tattered copy of the Precursor equivalent of "Wormhole Operations for Dummies" in the ruins where they got the weylforge.)
Okay. I always thought of the "core" as the entangled collapsed mass.
And that would be the kernel. Clearly I need to freshen up on terminology classes.(edited)
[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 . ]
I have to say, my confussion is mostly with how he manages to develop, hold and articulate all of this in his head without knoting it into a pretzel.
Are we sure he's not a first-in scout conducting some subtle memetic uplifting on us?(edited)
's why they insist on fluency. (Note to anyone putting together GURPS Eldraeverse: being linguistically weird in a similar way as lojban is to normal-language speakers, Eldraeic should definitely be Mental/Very Hard. In the absence of Mental/Excruciating, anyway.)
08:12
Heh. Not so much in my head. I have a 'verse wiki to keep my notes in. 12,394 topics and counting.
There's probably going to be that lovely awkward period where newbies are struggling with "how the heck do I declinate these clauses?" with Eldraeic... although given the culture probably also locals that enjoy helping the newbies through this, both because interesting insights and funny mistakes, and allso the whole investing in the future bit they like
@Overmind what got you to start this anyway? My familiarity with the Eldraeverse basicaly goes until something about 2014-2015 I think, when Atomic Rockets refered me to "Heavy Infantry" and the Havoc. So I don't know where or when this seriously started, only that there was one previous blog of some kind I cannot find.
@Unknown Yeah, that original blog is dead and gone. You're not missing anything, though; all the relevant content with a couple of decanonized exceptions has all been republished on the current one.
01:03
As for what got me started - well, like I say in my author blurb, I pretty much woke up one morning with a universe and a bunch of characters running around in my head. That means either authorship or schizophrenia, and the former seemed like a better bet. The current blog goes back to, hm, 2011 or so, the previous now-dead one a couple of years before that, but I've been fiddling with one version of the world or another - the early versions of which didn't bear much resemblance at all to the current, stable version - for probably around 20 years at this point.
@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 EsilmΓΊr production facility, if it can't be locally sourced.)(edited)
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01:16
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.
And then it is massive, as well. Can't find the original descriptor but when you have a payload weighting a few million metric tons without anything else...
I have to say, the photonic network is frightingly good at squirting executive software into things That Do Not Belong Online, and probably also at doing spaceborne nanowarfare.
...If that is the definition coming from a transhumanist/singularity seeker, it feels like a really weak one. Perplexing too, if you argue for the existence of a soul as metaphysical entity, or from a god (which also raises the question, from what god.)
Well, even pure-quill materialism is a metaphysical position. (Although lots of hardcore materialists and positivists will deny this, despite that being the intellectual equivalent of kicking away the ladder you're standing on and claiming it was never there in the first place.)
23:16
Now, I (along with my fictive chaps) might be inclined to argue that ethics arises implicitly from the nature of sophoncy... which is a metaphysical question in all respects not directly connected to a particular physical substrate.
I've always gotten a European vibe off of you, though I can't decide whether I like the French or Russian guess more. Also, I'm gonna apologize for the ζ₯ζ¬θͺ, I've got a pinyin keyboard but no kana and I felt popping on a dictionary to copy paste was cheating.
Greetings, and all the other ones from the great wall of translations above. I'm an archive binger, I like to start at the begnning and work my way forward. The important question is, are you here for some "Atomic Rockets approved" fiction or the worldbuilding behind it? if the first, The Core War is the longest individual story IIRC.
From the random-thoughts-not-used-because-of-lack-of-necessary-precursor-memes files:
"microaggression (n.): being shot with a derringer
macroaggression (n.): being shot with a rifle
megaaggression (n.): being shot with a howitzer
Extrapolate and interpolate as necessary."
Quick creepy-stalkerish question for those more familiar with Discord than I: is there any way to identify a server (presuming it's public) from the server ID/URL? I've been seeing a few discordapp.com/channels/... referrers showing up recently, and I'm kind of curious as to where they're coming from.
Where they go is mostly to a "you aren't a member of this server" page. Which may just mean it's private, I suppose, but since it didn't say so... well, curiosity, and all that.
Proposed: the matter/antimatter imbalance in the universe exists because time travelers from the distant post-stellar future stole all the antimatter early on to use in their power plants.
12:15
Also proposed: can we shove a wormhole end far enough into the future to be able to use the Heat Death of the Universe as a functionally-infinite entropy sink?
12:15
(we ignore for this purpose the likelihood of the Cold Ones coming back down the wormhole to eat our infostates)
Counterpoint to the second one: Do we really want to aid entropic decay of the Universe Information Carrigage Capacity by pumping any entropy we produce straight to Heat Death?
Hmmmm... honestly, I am not quite sold on the concept.
I mean yeah, entropy rises onwards (that much physical chemistry has hammered home) but that's a continous number, not an instant jump from "usefull" to "not usefull".
12:20
"High entropy" now will be "low entropy" further onwards, relatively speaking.
Yeah, but the work you can get out of a low-entropy state depends on the differential, right? (The entropy equivalent of the heat engine equation - it's the difference between the source and sink temps that matters, not the absolute value.) By giving you access to the final universe state where even the microwave background has decayed to within delta of nothing, you have the best possible sink, and so can extract more out of your low-entropy states before they decay to uselessness.(edited)
Yeah, this just brings the entropy sink to you, rather than the other way around. Which might be better for you, as the differential's even bigger if you don't have to wait for the universe to cool first.
Which of course raises the problem of building a transtemporal wormhole first, and it not collapsing as soon as a Q-bit of information goes through the bulk.
12:31
And well, getting it trillions of years into the future
Now, if you can punch holes in the universe and connect to other universes, you can build the perfect power plant: use one universe's Big Bang state as your source, and another's heat death as your sink.
12:32
There may be minor moral issues involved with basically aborting one entire universe's creation, and what you do with the other's desperate refugees/elder gods/both, but hey, the theory's sound!
Eh, it's all quantum physics. When you got e^500 universes to target at a minimum, snuffing out one cycle becomes kinda... irrelevant?
I mean, it's all gonna repeat itself anyway
...You know, abstract-rationaly, I understand perfectly well what this sentence is supposed to say.
Another part of me just finds it funny and wants to laugh for no reason.
Or you take 40-meter tall mechs, stuff a child soldier inside it, and give him a gun that shoots projectiles whose fusion explosions spread higher-dimension radiation that kills bulk beings... (Shoutout to Aeon Entelechy Evangelion. If you feel your day is going too good, check it out. Also recommended for all matters high-dimension technobabble.)
the sort of culture that can build a wormhole to other universes seems like the sort of culture that can build some nice deep-black habitats for the desperate surviving refugees of a heatdeath universe, mind
Now I'm wondering if a perversion can mutate into a being capable of being a reasonable galactic citizen. It'd be hard to convince everyone else if it did, given the first rule for handling perversions seems to be "don't talk to it"
One last thought on interdimensional (transtemporal) operations and civilizations:
It is assumed for first: There exists a Multiverse, where ΞQ > 0 applies
It is assumed for second: It is possible to travel between individual universal entities in some manner, and achive the exchange of discrete information from one universe to another
it is assumed for third: Specific event points within a universe can be targeted, or Universes do not run "in synch" - Which is to say, one universe can exist near the big bang at the same "multiverse time" as another universe is approaching maximum entropy.
In consequence: Given that such a Multiverse expresses every possible information state in some manner, it is very much possible to target one universe to draw power from the big bangs big soup, and use another universe as an entropy sink - As every possible state is expressed in such a universe, there exists another universe where the causal branch made impossible by interference of another universe is possible, and thus no information is ultimately destroyed or interfered with.
However, this implies the existence of a limiting factor that I will henceforth call the "Metacausal Event Exception" - Which is to say, not only does ΞQ > 0 apply, there also applies Event NxUx β NxUy in consequence of the former law, so that no universe may express the same information state. In consequence, for a universe where living off other universes is possible, there exists a universe where the same is, for one reason, impossible.
So you better hope the cosmic dice dealt you a favorable number. If not, you may curse the great ontology and contemplate your eventual decoherence, or hope Bulk ascension is a metacausal event in your universe.
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03:24
===================
Other fun ideas of interuniversal travel:
Ontology take-over: One universe civilization(s) might seek to take over a more favorable ontological framework and evict or recompilate whatever occupies that ontological framework at the moment.
This gets even more interesting if you allow for differing natural laws: Then the Biggest Game is for the control of favorable ontological frameworks.
Differing natural laws can also lead to:
Ontological Convergence: Your universe might suppot a form of FTL travel compared to other universes. As such, inter-universal factions might often tranfer in and out of your reality to use it as a short-cut. Hospitality (and hostility) and associated opportunities of trade obviously apply. (For one example.)(edited)
"Ah, I see it's time for the most awkward part of first contact: the part where they're selling plushies of you."
"Can we make them stop?"
"No, but you can sue them, and then settle out-of-court for 50% of the net."
I was about to say. Especially if the body plan's sufficiently similiar, the artwork of the oldest profession is not far behind...
...If not in front.
And that came out wrong. Excuse me. (edited)
Followed by the rebutals: "If the honorable Sophont would have been more agreeable to handing over personality data for us to build a more authentic emulation based off, this honorable corporation could have avoided the miss-reprentation debacle. And this honorable corporation would like to remind the honorable gentlesophont that by imperial law we do follow privacy laws regarding root personality data."(edited)
14:58
Or somesuch argumentation; I don't think I hit the tone right
Note: I've created the #spoilers channel for spoilers for Things That Aren't Mine, 'cause I had a The Last Jedi thought to share. If you mind spoilers for Recent Media Stuff, it's a channel to stay out of.
So Iβve been playing around a bit with nuclear reactor design, as one does. Thinking about the gap in the portfolio between the high-performance and high-unfriendliness molten-salt designs meβ¦
probably don't want helium as the chosen gas if there is a plausible alternative, manipulating helium is an extremely painful process if you want it to do more than just sit there. It's used in stuff like supercooled magnets less because it's good to work with and more because liquid hydrogen is even more of a horror and there aren't really other options.
even just sitting their has issues, a pressure tank caved in on a SpaceX rocket and froze some LOX/LH2 (one of them) causing "Rapid unplanned disassembley"
Iβve got a feeling that having the gas free-flowing through the the reactor is going to cause weird turbulence in the fuel and probably carry fuel vapors into the coolant loop. Both donβt sound fun
@MarcusAurelius I was thinking of the turbulence as an advantage, actually: on the one hand, it improves mixing of gas and liquid, and so thermal transfer; but also, by keeping the liquid in the core agitated, it helps prevent the high-density uranium salts from settling out or concentrating to form a hot spot, or worse, a prompt criticality.
Fuel vapors, now. Yeah. Those could definitely be a problem.
Itβs a trade off, I guess: better thermal properties, but now youβre coolant is going to radioactive, which leads to fun stuff like neutron embrittlement
@Morgrim Moon I'd looked at carbon dioxide (like a CANDU) as a possibility, and a couple of others, but I've noticed that a lot of gas-cooled reactor designs seem to prefer helium because it doesn't neutron-activate easily, so you don't have to worry about significant amounts of radioactivity in the coolant. He (although at least not liquid He, thank Eris) handling might be worth it if you can eliminate the steam generator and the whole secondary loop.(edited)
What temperature is this supposed to work at anyway? Modern molten salt reactors use fluid cooling, not helium gas cooling, while operating at around 600 to 700 degrees celcius.
14:30
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSR
Like, this canadian reactor operates using low-enriched uranium fuel mxed with carrier salts, not Thorium salts, and works using liquid cooling. So what's the advantage of gas cooling?
The Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) is a design for a small modular reactor (SMR) that employs molten salt reactor technology, based closely on the DMSR design (see DMSR) from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN, USA, and it incorporates elemen...
@MarcusAurelius it does, but thatβs a writo. It should say D2O - heavy water.
20:42
@Unknown The big advantage of gas cooling is that using He, which doesnβt neutron-activate significantly, you can use the primary directly and eliminate the whole secondary coolant loop.
Secondary ones are that it provides convenient ways to extract gaseous reaction products and agitate the core, but those are more handy side-effects than anything.
20:45
And Iβm not opposed to using a carrier-salt solvent rather than water: the key thing is that whatever the solvent is, it has to work well with the fuel regenerator for extracting neutron poisons and stable waste products, since this designβs intended to eliminate all fuel assemblies and let you refuel without ever shutting down.
(Eesh, it'd be nice to be able to create pinned messages without having to drop them in the normal flow of traffic. 'Cause then I wouldn't have to explain that the following isn't prompted by anything anyone did or anything that I expect anyone to do - it's just that I've been reminded that it's a Really Good Idea to have some sort of rule/code of conduct in advance of any issues that do turn up.)(edited)
00:50
Default Uncode of Conduct for Participating Here
If it turns out that you need a code of conduct to tell you, in general, how to conduct yourself as a civilized sophont, and/or in specific, not to do that shit you just did - you're gone.
Meta-Uncode of Conduct for Participating Here
Demanding a more formal code of conduct, or elsewise to know what my standards are before the hammer falls, will be taken as prima facie evidence of intent to game the system. You're gone.
Clarificatory Note
As the founder/owner/author, I have appointed myself Community Manager, Grand Master of the Knights of Standards & Practices, and Chief Ear-Scritcher of Doombringer the Adorable. As such, my judgment is final. Attempting to argue the toss with any of the above after the fact will be taken as a prima facie attempt to create Internet drama, which is... you guessed it. You're gone.
A Final Word
Have a nice day!(edited)
Iβm reminded of a fantasy RPG book I read where alchemists made blocks of stone or metal that produced a steady amount of heat for an extended period and then used them for steam power
I've seen similar. Dragons could make a special rock called 'everglow' with a particular way of flaming it repeatedly, and it'd stay glowing warm for about a year. The dragons used this for bedding and incubating nests. It was only when they allied with humans that the humans had a brainwave about steam power.
I'm currently reading the Sufficiently Advanced rulebook, which is a High-Transhumanism Tabletop RPG. And I want to create a Eldreaverse Charecter for it. So I must ask of you: What would function best as the core values of the Empire? You must pick two - that's how many core values a civilisation gets, from what I have seen.
Aside question given the wiki mentions "root access" to paraphrase, for neural weaves: How much root access do Eldraeverse brain DNI solutions offer commonly?
[How much root access do neural interfaces offer commonly?]
Depends on model. If you go full synnoetic (which a lot of people do, because it's just so powerful and convenient) there's functionally no difference between the neural lace and your brain. Less integrated solutions are available for those who feel -paranoid- cautious.(edited)
08:44
But, y'know, you have to miss out on a lot of features that way.
would comparatively 'new' species have to settle for less effective solutions for a while? I imagine it takes some research to adapt stuff like neural laces to unfamiliar biologies. Especially how weird some biologies can get...
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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@Morgrim Moon Yeah, there are some definite limitations for a while while the problems of interfacing to different brain-structures are worked out.
08:50
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.
(UNA is sophotechnological handwavium that reformats a brain into a neurocomputer VM for running mind-states.)
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08:55
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.
@Archon To bring this back around to your original question - just two? And it wants one-word CVs, doesn't it... well, if you've got to cut down the Imperial motto, "Order, Progress, Liberty", run with Liberty and Progress. (Order in their sense being mostly emergent order, it doesn't mean what people would probably assume it to mean anyway - you might be better off calling that one "Civilization and Good Form") Or you could treat "Progress" as the civilization's Benefit, I suppose. I know the background, as of 1e, at least, but haven't played with the crunch myself.
I'll be honest, brain uploading makes me uncomfortable in general, but gradual uploading a little less so.
09:25
For instance, the game Nova Praxis has a process called "apotheosis" where nanobots are injected into the brain and over the course of a week replace your neurons with a carbon nanotube-based neural net.
I have to admit, Eclipse Phase-style continous uploads are better than fork-uploading or unconscious uploads, but overall I still follow the identity pattern theory.
09:27
So personally I prefer gettin reinstantiated from Stack instead of being permanent-dead.
I think a Stack might still count as a fork, it's possible (though difficult) to remove one without killing the user and instantiate the Ego saved on it.
Still, I'd have an easier time believing I was still me if I was instanced from a stack that remembered dying than from a backup scanned a day before I died.
Well. Likely at best you'd remember the few seconds leading up to the accident, because our current fleshbrains WILL fail to record the moment of impact.
I was in a nasty bike smash once and I still clearly remember all the events from when it started until ~2 seconds before the moment of impact, and then my memory is utterly blank until it was all over and a stranger was demanding to know if I was alright while prising me free
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.)(edited)
And the gaps which can often appear in long-term memory due to brain trauma of some kind
09:37
Yeah
09:38
Especially if you got crushed or something.... your death is not gonna be nice. Lungshots or other such wounds would be especially nasty.
09:40
Moreso because while rationaly you know you have a stack and a back-up, youβre still gonna go into panic βmust-surviveβ mode and your brain is going to run finalShutdown.exe regardless.
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.
You canβt edit self-preservation instincts out however. Or rather, not without a replacement.
Same way a computer will trow error reports youβll have to live with your own Blue Screen of Death - Or rather, the Kernel panic that preceeds that
What you can do, though, is make them susceptible to veto. (I mean, some baselines manage to do that; plenty of people stay at their posts to save other lives or complete important tasks despite knowing that doing so will kill them.)
preparing for disaster scenarios can drop that instinct-gap down to a few seconds though even in baseline humans, and still have you functioning 'reasonably' for the minutes beforehand. Which is enough to be invaluable if you can hack it into brains automatically
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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09:53
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.
@Overmind, Liberty and Progress seem quite appropriate. You don't need one-word ones though; a example character has "Fight like a corned rat" instead of "self-preservation" (which is the core value everyone gets for free).
Do the values necessarily have to be in English? If not, you could just ask a certain generous author for the relevant Eldraic words with all their long glosses and nuances.
I would not think they have to be in english, but if they aren't, your gonna have to spend a bunch of time explaining their meaning to your gaming group - invoking your core values is one of the basic ways to do well at something in this game.
21:33
I was kinda considering doing it anyway.
21:33
You get self-preservation (which you can rename, if you want), two from your civilization, and one free choice, as a starting charecter.
βMirΓΓ«. Idaharis. JΓrileth. Order, progress, liberty. These are the principles to which we have dedicated ourselves, we of this new-forged Empire. β βBut not the externally-imposed kΓ³rasmirΓΓ« oβ¦
@Overmind One question I have been bugging myself about: How do they achive relativistic velocities for the mass drivers in the Eldraeverse? And what are usual projectile masses?
More serious answer: shitbucketfuls of energy and in the modern era, a little help from the ontotechnological vector control equivalent of the "mass effect", with a side note that relativistic velocities in this case tends to mean "a few percent of c , not 99% of c ".
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.
@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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13:01
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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13:03
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.
Why do I have the feeling the Primary Laser Officer made a point of preserving the piece of adaptive-paint-covered hull displaying the spacecrafts name so that it may be displayed as Evidence Of Stupidity Of The Highest Degree at some combat academy?
So, can I dump summaries and opinions on Sci-Fi books that no one here would most likely read, because it's written in Russian? Or better limit discussion to Eldrae-verse?
On the former, I have no objection, and #random is probably the best place for now. If book summaries/reviews in general turn out to be things a lot of us are interested in, I'll whip up a dedicated channel for them.
On the third book: it's in process, but is currently waiting on (a) I and my lovely editor finding enough time to finish the editing; and (b) the cover art. More news when I have it.
I've been re-reading the specs of CMS Greed and Mass-Energy, and there were a few things I was wondering about:
40,000 (metric?) tons of cargo is... suprisingly unfitting for a base-12 system. Moreso because it just doesn't really distribute across six symetrical faces evenly. Or did I miss something?
14:52
Second, how much more fuel than cargo does she carry, and in what state (read, density)?
@Unknown It is mentioned as tons displaced.... Which is a volume measure. I suggest liquid hydrogen because it is fuel and what was used in Traveller ship design.
A first disclaimer: if you're looking for hard numbers, you won't find them here because the post in question ( https://eldraeverse.com/2014/05/22/in-lieu-of-in-lieu/ ) was a quick verbal sketch and I haven't actually sat down and computed out the hard numbers.
Well, I was going to post the second part of The Shipping Trade today, except that writing it didnβt happen because of day job, and so forth. Then, I thought I might post a sketch of the shipβ¦
01:43
That said, @john dougan(his grace/his grace) is exactly correct in that that "roughly 40,000 tons displacement" is a volume measure; and for that matter, in the post in question I was actually using Traveller displacement tons as a familiar measurement.
01:44
(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.)
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.(edited)
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01:55
(The fuel is a 2H-3He blend, stored as supercooled slush.)
After the beach-buggies-across-Namibia episode - well, Iβve got to speculate what these three would get up to in a place where the cars are nuclear powered, the engineers are already slightly mad, and you can take pretty much anything on the road with sufficient tort coverage...
they'd face the challenge of "do we get something functional-but-ugly and then make it pretty" vs "do we make something pretty and then figure out how to make it go?"
I just... want to share a result of old SB brainstorm. When, very very stupid question of "I want to kill the lampreys. How to do it?" resulted in Little Boy. Bacterium with UHMWPE cell wall that eats most organic things.
https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/4119417/https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/4125933/
It's designed to shut down whole biospheres and be generally total pain in the ass to deal with while infected substrates while transforming said substrates into plastic and shitting paint thinner.(edited)
i've gotten a little bit lost as to where we are, other than we've yet to start our decel phase and we've voted against using RKKV spam to fuck up the...
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12:36
Mostly realistic, kind of a thing that will cause everyone in Eldrae-verse to go and kill perpetrator.
So one bad handling is all you need to get this stuff somewhere else. NOW, on a personal level I'd say nanophages will still kill this bastard, but stopping a biosphere deterioration... seems very improbable.
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.
Then you go hunt down the idiots responsible and explain to them some of the other uses of ambiplasma.
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13:07
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".
While RandomJ wasn't seen for last 6 years, worth having links to exactly why you want a medical cruiser with more antimatter munition than combat cruisers.
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.
(I was originally inspired to the idea, incidentally. when reading up on Ebola/Marburg, and noting the curious fact that its outbreaks, one way or another, all trace back to Kitume Cave.
It'd be the Trek's End scenario, only with less "Your meddling would threaten galactic peace" and more "Fifty HFY threads later, we concluded that you were an entire planet of omnicidal racist maniacs".
Could do a lot worse than AR. TV Tropes... maybe not.
13:29
(Not to diss SB, certainly not entirely: but it does manage to produce the most fascinating mix of "This is an interesting read" with "Dude, I must seriously question your mental state". .)
Then there's SV, with it's "We don't like what's happened on SB, let's migrate and make it look like we pay attention to user's government". And QQ.
13:32
On completely different note: https://m.fanfiction.net/s/7406866/8/To-the-Stars start of this chapter describes quite... fascinating government for trans-baseline species. For a month I wonder how Eldrae would respond and failing to construct appropriate mental model. So, decided to ask directly.
I have to be honest, what depresses me personaly is that we do not have a lot of post-cyberpunk/transhuman stories, especially with more positive outlooks.
13:36
And yes, I am personaly guilty of this, in a way, but I am ignoring that here.
Any setting I personaly push forward aims to deconstruct that idea.
13:46
Funnily enough, that also means that the transhumans in my settings fuck a lot of shit up, and actually aren't that enlightened, because it deconstructs human notions.
But they also aren't bad guys. I still think the idea of "Yin-Yang" as in balance, describes my worldbuilding pretty much the best.
Amusingly enough, that's one of the notions I'm setting about deconstructing, inasmuch as that's any part of my process. (Having read all too many stories on the inevitability/necessity of the balance between good and evil, how every light casts a shadow, the need for contrast to give positive foo meaning, non-conflict-is-stagnation, and suchlike tropes, I figured it was about time for a universe where our protagonists can actually kick the Dark Side in its happy place and steal its lunch money, and where things once saved quite often stay saved.)
Hence... Space Elves.
I just wanted to say "then humans are Space Elves" and its the same kind of "humanity is totaly enlightened" meme I always deconstruct.
The... grey world symptome is more of a side effect.
So... kick the humans out, you get the Eldraeverse.
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.
As my little rant from the IthΓ‘valic 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 .
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 forβ¦
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14:13
It's what you do with those capacities that is the true measure of a soph.
Eh, I agree with that.
It's more of a narrative unsatisfaction. A character that never questions his actions, always understands perfectly and always has the tools and ressources at hand... is hollow.
"Show us that your qalasΓr measures up to your potential. Or squander the powers that your ancestors gave you, and in so doing, know yourself forever a soul of a lesser order."
Hm, maybe. On the other hand, it's also fairly likely that I'm an old reactionary reacting against characters with a superabundance of flaws by helping to satisfy my demand for the more-found-in-classic-SF Awesomeness Being Awesome subgenre.
@o11o1 In fairness, they do trounce most of their problems without effort, which is what makes it interesting and compelling to adventurers, weirdseekers, and other such types to seek out problems that can't be. After all, what would be the fun in not?
14:24
Actually, as a side note, I should say that I'm not opposed to all flaws, just - well, look at Miles Vorkosigan as an example.
14:25
He's a flawed protagonist, sure, but his flaws are inextricably linked to, and often derive from, his awesomeness field. Those are the kind of flaws I like and prefer to use/read about, rather than the kind of flaws that stem from intrinsic suckage.
Intrinsiqueness implies it cannot be changed, cannot be overcome or otherwise molded as characters wish, and that runs diametral to any idea of characters and storytelling.
Well, maybe outside of classical tragedy.
On Eldrae note: They mostly use in-vivio methods to produce children, as far as I remember. Do they have backups in women in case there's a need to procreate, there's insufficient infrastructure available and leaving a child without cortical stack and other important implants that could be grown by symbiotic nanites is against Eldrae's Core Rights and Contract.
@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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22:44
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.
@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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22:54
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.
A way in which Eldraeverse has gotten itno my head: sometimes I'll see something and not just think "that is cool", but "that seems like the sort of thing the eldrae would appreciate"
I seem to recall that Eldrae had some sort of biological radio transceivers in their brains. Is that the neural lace or something the precursors added?
And now my question about nanogenetic flora being able to be translated in vivio feels stupid, because they already had that well before hand, so any additional systems would get and be added to work of precursors.
@Morgrim Moon Thanks muchly; I shall take that as quite the compliment!
12:14
@NHO Ah, but much of it needs to go in different places and behave differently to the Precursors' generalized vector-control nanocytes. (Also, earlier, in a sense: there were a lot of simpler nano[cyte|some]-based upgrades around before science was able to take a decent crack at reverse-engineering Precursor space magic.)
I bet those natural radios helped a lot with early DNIs....
Also, another question I've been wondering about... Has anyone ever opted for (permanent) suspension/effective death?
I will find my death here in the Exclaves. He β that outworlder β beat my friend to death. Not for profit. Not for a plan or a revenge or some twisted necessity. Slowly, and for his β¦
@Unknown ...probably, under the trillion-people rule, if they could think of a good reason for it, which I confess none of are coming to me right now. Do you have a scenario in mind?
11:52
@Unknown Less than you might think, given that the relevant chunk of brain is basically an EM mouth-and-ear equivalent with a wider bandwidth. On the other hand, it did allow the convenient development of the "farspeech/envision interface", which might be thought of as a predecessor to the general neural interface.
...Sorry, but I am not buying that just like that.
Though it wouldn't suprise me that that idea got prunned out of the mindpool for all the distressing nastiness it causes.
Why persist on persistance, either?
The state of achievable information in a given reality is always inherently limited, or only resolable until a certain granulate.
Also: "A volitional being selects both means and goals. Selecting a goal implies that it ought be done. Selecting a means that defeats the goal at which it aims is self-defeating; whatever cannot be done ought not be done. Self-destruction frustrates all aims, all ends, all purposes. Therefore self-destruction ought not be sought."
@Emanwe There's only so much unique existence around. At some point, you will inherently run into the issue that all unique information has been exhausted (and likely stored).
@Overmind Unless you are aware of means by which you can increase the reality granulate... and even then, is that change of information state percievable, and meaningfull?
You could run all posible plank-length itterations of information interactiom, but even then there is an endpoint - Unless you move beyond 4D time, and define yourself as a timless axis of definitte extension.
15:53
@Overmind Though I would argue that is because we forget and destroy codified information.
Well, yeah, but since no-one has ever reached that endpoint or is likely be able to in time available before heat death, it's about as non-problemy as non-problems are ever likely to be. If you're suffering ennui now because you might run out of fun in > 10^100 years, that's a psychological issue.
Or which is to say, there are two options: A finite 4D timeline of all information, codified, or an infinite repetition of information creation and permutation, with no permanent retention.
AND, in extension of that all: Can every individual always find a cause for continued persistance on an active state?
@Overmind Sorry, but that is a cheap-shot argument.
15:57
It's philosophy. It's inherently both psychological and subjective.
(Hm. Well, I can practically recite the scripts of some of my favorite forms of entertainment, and this does not reduce the pleasure of a rewatch. It's the experience, not the content.)
It sounds like we're moving the goalposts here: we started with the question of whether an Eldrae-grade entity could legitimately want to end, and ended up debating whether there's enough unique experience in the universe for an infinite lifetime.
But that's a different matter for another day, for me personaly.
16:01
(Also because, while we made our points, I suspect there will be no deviation from those points. Which leaves us at a (momentary) agree to disagree position.)
You started with the non-philosophical question of "Has anyone done/do people do this?", and gave this as a reason. The answer is "No, because it's a very abstract philosophical question that is irrelevant to any decisions people might need to make within the lifespan of the current universe." It's not intended to be a cheap shot, it's pointing out that there's no experiential connection between any immortal that can exist in the/their present and being stuck in a infinite repeat and the possibility is well beyond even the Senate Committee on Extremely Long-Range Planning's time horizon.