November 2024
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Mark <teleros@gmail.com> on 2018-06-19 11:24:15 wrote:
So what happens when you send out a self-contained Cirys superzorcher construction package to a distant star, far away from where anyone is looking?
Pick your target.
To avoid being blamed for this, make sure the self-replicating robots & superzorcher components etc look nothing like your normal technology. Have them be constructed along the system ecliptic until they’re all ready, so astronomers will find it difficult to spot until it’s too late. Finally, and if you’re worried about being blamed, hit one of your own worlds - one big enough to matter, and ideally close enough to the real target that whichever unknown power attacked might have mistaken it for a world of the real target (alternatively, pick a world that would be a natural choice for humanitarian aid to the real target). After all, who’d be insane enough to attack his own people like this?
Finally, once the superzorchers have fired, their components should all dive into their star or otherwise self-terminate. Unless you want them to start anew in fresh systems, of course
For anyone with Empire or Core levels of technology this should be a pretty nice low-cost means of crippling everyone you dislike. I wonder if you could also decapitate the Empire (and kill off much of the Transcend) this way. The only real problem is the ramp-up time, as starting from a single robot ship or three (got to keep the whole thing quiet, remember) and ending up with a Dyson swarm will take a while. But perhaps if someone had begun it some decades ago…?
Also, on a completely separate note, have you tried a piece of software called “Dia” for mapmaking purposes? I found it quite useful when doing my own wormhole / tube station maps:
http://dia-installer.de
Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-06-19 12:13:41 wrote:
Short answer: They kill it, then they kill you.
(Assuming the Second Directorate’s, et. al., gigacidal whackjob patrol haven’t sent assassins after you already. Quietly shooting dangerous nutcases in the head to prevent unpleasantly messy wars is, after all, a prestigious line of work with a long and honorable tradition.)
Long answer: Well, to send out such a probe, you need a lighthugger and/or an interstellar launching laser. The notable thing about either of those particular technologies is that the people and organizations who have access to them? Absolutely infested with spies, for this sort of reason, along with other Clever Ideas people might have.
(It also helps that you can’t light off a lighthugger’s drive in any sort of stealthy way: you can see a pion drive’s highly distinctive emissions from a couple of star systems over with the Mark One Eyeball.)
And, of course, the thing itself isn’t all that subtle even while in the relatively early stages of construction, and peculiar stellar anomalies (hello, KIC 8462852 ) are the sort of thing that get the Barrascán Array - with its 20 cm resolution at 2,250 light-years - or its bigger cousins pointed in your direction.
At which point people start retasking their RKV deterrent fleets.
Which is not to say it can’t be pulled off; just that the forces of People Who Want To Be Alive Tomorrow have made it cost more in time, cleverness, money, and hazard than just about anyone can afford to cover.
(And that’s before you consider that actually using the thing is pretty much certain to trigger CASE SKYSHOCK RED as everyone launches civ-killer attacks at their entire current-and-possible enemies list just in case they’re next, whether on the potential target list or maybe already orbiting-dead planets on the beam’s-on-the-way list.)
Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-06-19 12:15:35 wrote:
As for Dia, I haven’t tried it yet - been using yed - but I’ll check it out.
Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2018-06-19 16:25:20 wrote:
while condemned by Cirys Aendyr himself – who is said to have wept when this application of his concept was brought to his attention
Given the society he came to being in, I’m somewhat surprised he didn’t anticipate that someone would think of weaponizing something of that scale right off the bat.
Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-06-19 17:19:27 wrote:
You mean the society in which the first reaction to the nucleonic device was that it would be completely useless as a weapon? That society?
Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2018-06-19 17:30:33 wrote:
Given that we’re only getting that particular detail now, vis a vis the many lovingly crafted paragraphs about “What an Awesome Boomstick I Have” and “Why Violence Against ‘Barbarians’ Is Good and Right” scattered elsewhere across the site: Yes, it is surprising.
Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-06-19 17:36:33 wrote:
September 2011: Orion Drives
Not the only place it’s mentioned, but the first one that comes up on a quick google.
Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2018-06-19 17:46:42 wrote:
Alright, I’ll concede that it was new to me .
Nevertheless, my counterpoint – that there are many, many more volumes of text on the various ways that the futuristic technology of the setting has been put to enthusiastic military use, and the many, many more paragraphs triumphantly extolling the use of naked force and even extermination campaigns against those they deem insufficiently virtuous – you’ll have to forgive me if I still have no sympathy for what I see as crocodile tears from a member of a species of self-admitted sociopaths.
(Additional counterpoint: Admiral Caliéne Sargas “the Worldburner”)
Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2018-06-19 17:47:57 wrote:
That should be “my counterpoint [followed by block of text] still stands , and…”
Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-06-19 19:27:05 wrote:
Not only is this interpretation - since I do not subscribe to Death of the Author - not even wrong, but the underlying facts in evidence are also, well, not even wrong.
Attentive reread recommended.
R.C. <richardjacole84@hotmail.com> on 2018-06-20 10:59:46 wrote:
From my reading, the only group even loosely associated with the Empire that ‘triumphantly’ extols ‘the use of naked force and even extermination campaigns against those they deem insufficiently virtuous’ are the Blood of Tyrants, who are explicitly described as fanatical, mostly-Renegade terrorists proscribed by the Empire.
Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-06-21 11:19:11 wrote:
Additional counter-counterpoint: who is depicted as the Admiralty’s pet sociopath, very much the exception to the rule, and brought out only for necessary special occasions.
BigBombR <wouter.debois@gmail.com> on 2018-06-20 02:05:10 wrote:
So lasersails are considered impractical but amat propulsion isn’t?
Your setting, your choice. But I’m sceptical.
AI <ai0867@gmail.com> on 2018-06-20 05:28:45 wrote:
You’re misreading. Lasersails are practical, there’s just no need for quite so big a laser, as the craft it propels would either have to be absolutely huge, or the acceleration (and requirements on the structure and ablator) would be insurmountable.
Probably both, actually.
As for lighthuggers, they stay out in the kuiper belt for exactly that reason. You might think about pointing them at a star system, but your drive is very bright, and if you fail to flip over at turnaround, you’ll probably get a lot of ordnance thrown your way in a hurry.
Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-06-20 08:03:41 wrote:
Ah, not sure where you’re getting that from. Laser sails are entirely practical - we see an exploratory probe laser-launcher in Let There Be Light , and developed systems routinely use them to exchange tanglebits - and widely used. This is just pointing out a strong norm against building things indistinguishable from planet-melting superweapons when you don’t have any real need for them to make your laser sails work.
Also, the WMD potential of a lighthugger is acknowledged here - Ask Dr. Science - which is why they’re limited in where they’re allowed to go; but the thing is, even a purpose-built RKV is interceptable. An NDB is not.
(And if you’re trying to move moon-massed objects across interstellar distances in useful time, you’re really going to need that pion drive.)
Ru <shearwater@gmail.com> on 2018-06-23 08:05:50 wrote:
(And if you’re trying to move moon-massed objects across interstellar distances in useful time, you’re really going to need that pion drive.)
I wonder about that. An AM engine has all sorts of problematic issues; if nothing else, manufacturing all that AM is generally quite inefficient (and I don’t recall you mentioning that the Eldrae have access to more exotic things like Q-balls, though perhaps I misremember).
A hefty sailbeam installation on the other hand seems like it would do a good job of imparting an awful lot of momentum without the whole issue of having a gamma ray source with a kardashev score >1, which is the sort of thing you don’t want near your loved ones when it leavs or arrives.
(on another note, if you’ve got a planetary-scale engine, you’ll have no problems making a vast parabolic reflector out of muonic metal and clawing back another big of the annihilation energy for useful purposes, so it wouldn’t be a pure pion drive)
Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-06-24 15:59:51 wrote:
I’m not planning to disclose the mechanics of the contraterragenesis carried out at Esilmúr just yet (spoilers!), although inasmuch as the roughly-50%-efficient singularity inductors are a freely offered export tech, that gives you a baseline for what they’re beating.
But the most relevant thing, perhaps, is that Esilmúr is a Cirys bubble , which means that economies of scale kick in hard. Out there, they store their antimatter in planet-sized blobs of antideuterium slush, and they’ve got lots of 'em. No-one’s going to run short any time soon.
(The specific objects in question, by the way, are stargates. Pushing that heavy kernel around needs considerable oomph.)
Ru <shearwater@gmail.com> on 2018-06-26 15:09:15 wrote:
Its more that the inefficiencies can stack up quite fast in antimatter rockets. Once you’ve made the stuff, there’s plenty of scope for losing energy in the annihilation reaction, though.
You’ll waste some energy if your magnetic nozzle is too small. Needs to be 2km+ long if you want to harvest the energy of those charged muon decays, though if you’re throwing moons around that probably isn’t a problem.
Your magnetic nozzle has a maximum efficiency of ~80% anyway.
You’ll waste some energy if you can’t reflect gamma rays (which your muonic metals may or may not be able to do; that’s beyond my meagre physics skills to work out).
You’ll potentially waste quite a lot of energy in the acceleration and decceleration phases, as the propulsive efficiency of beam-core drives (Ve 0.3C) pushing slow objects is pretty low.
If you’re fuelling up your spacecraft ahead of time, you pay a big cost in accelerating all that fuel. You could deliver fuel via laser sails mid flight, of course.
If you’ve got more energy than you know what to do with, then this isn’t really an issue of anything other than aesthetics, and who cares about those?
Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-06-29 14:26:42 wrote:
I don’t want to get into all the fiddly details of their pion drives right now, but suffice it to say that there are lots of interesting ultratech widgets in there optimizing the reaction…
(And initial acceleration/final deceleration tends to involve some regular old fusion burns.)
1 reply
January 28
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…so. One of the few useful applications of the Cirys-superzorcher-in-an-autoindustrial-box is to induce CASE SKYSHOCK RED and wreck the Worlds by autoimmune fratricide. Not useful to the Worlds, but useful to their neighbours, if their neighbours were desperate enough.
I’m not clear on whether the Republic has the necessary technical base to set up a couple of dozen superzorchers inside the Worlds and frame the eldrae for it. But I’m not clear that they don’t.
1 reply
January 28
On the one hand, autoindustrialism is one of those concepts that makes the Republic a mite… twitchy… given their attitudes towards a variety of technologies.
And on the same hand, in the above comments are the reasons why doing this even once without (a) leaving a trail pointing back to you that can be followed by anyone equipped with eyeballs, and (b) being caught at it by rather obvious changes in the astronomy of the target star is extremely impractical, never mind doing it more than once.
And further on the same hand is that a convincing frame job requires at least a vaguely plausible motive.
And even further on that hand is that the Republic, despite its sundry issues, is not in fact run by psychotic mass-murderers.
But even leaving aside those things, the chief problem with such a plan is that it is a plan basically isomorphic to China, say, or France, or Australia, in the middle of the Cold War deciding that what they really ought to do is frame one of the superpowers for launching a massive nuclear first-strike on the grounds that after triggering Armageddon, they can sit back and relax in the assurance that they’ll come out ahead and the bad consequences will only happen to other people.
As such, any Republic admirals likely to come up with such a plan are transferred without delay to St. Dymphna’s Home for the Dangerously Deranged and kept on a strict diet of antipsychotic drugs and severely restricted visitor permissions for the rest of their lives.
2 replies
January 28
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That’s reassuring. I look forward to seeing what Vonis Prime does instead, when they realise how far behind they are. Give up, probably.
January 31
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But even leaving aside those things, the chief problem with such a plan is that it is a plan basically isomorphic to China, say, or France, or Australia, in the middle of the Cold War deciding that what they really ought to do is frame one of the superpowers for launching a massive nuclear first-strike on the grounds that after triggering Armageddon, they can sit back and relax in the assurance that they’ll come out ahead and the bad consequences will only happen to other people.
The real Operation Northwoods , unlike the version in Stross’s Merchant Princes books, wasn’t proposing a nuclear false flag (that anyone’s admitted, anyway!), but it was close enough.
