Topic: The Gaian Regime Empire Thread | Terrans | GalactiRace (Read 46465 times)

Draignean · « **Reply #495 on:** May 15, 2019, 07:14:40 pm »

Strategy and black market votes locked.

andrea · « **Reply #496 on:** May 18, 2019, 02:34:07 pm »

Here is a small idea which I wrote for fun but we shouldn't do, because it is dangerous, because it would probably be incredibly expensive and because draignean said we would be trying to skip several tech tree steps to do this.

Black hole generator

Weapons, propulsion, defences. All requires power. It is therefore imperative to fit more power generators in our ships, and where else to look than the densest thing that exist?

Black holes aren't truly black. They decay, at a rate which is faster for small ones. Going down enough in size, they can produce power enough to fulfill the needs of any spaceship, while being long lasting enough to never needing to refuel within the expected lifetime of our civilization. This long lifetime means that we don't risk the black hole decreasing in mass to the point of rapidly increasing its power output and violently exploding, which ( so we are assured) is good. Such a black hole would merely be roughly 200 million tons: large, but there are many hundred thousand objects of this size in our solar system ready for picking.

Turning an asteroid into a black hole, however, is a significantly harder challenge, considering the slight scale difference between your typical asteroid and the stuff that generally collapses into a singularity. To overcome this, we can use our grav expertise: an enormous array of grav emitters is built in our home system , on a moving platform. Upon finding an asteroid and surrounding it, the grav emitters create an harmonic that produces an enormous gravity spike in the core of the asteroid. Meanwhile, several wave motion guns work on the outside to crush and push the asteroid into this central gravity anomaly. Matter compresses, it becomes neutronium and finally aided by the gravity spike it pushes all the way into a singularity. The end result is a stable black hole with power in the terawatt range. Normally moving such an heavy object at a reasonable rate would be challenging, but thankfully our grav drives care not about the mass of objects and can be used to manipulate the black hole and insert it into the generator.

The generator consists of an heavy shell capable of sustaining the radiation and turning it into energy, plus a dedicated grav engine linked to the ship's propulsion system to ensure that the black hole always stays within the containment area. In addition to that, the module is highly armoured due to the mdoerately catastrophic consequences of a breach.

A toned down generator could be used to keep a miniature star on board, generating power through fusion.

Draignean · « **Reply #497 on:** June 12, 2019, 11:35:55 pm »

Tango
The Pacemaster in orbit around Tango is no more. Transmissions ceased partway through the year, with the last transmission cutting out abruptly. The captain of the vessel reported red alert status, identifying a single aperture in bloom near the middle of engagement range. Without a full bore drive of his own his only option had been to open a communications bore and wait for the inevitable. Unfortunately, the log doesn't even contain a report of exactly what came through the aperture. The ship underwent a power failure nearly at the same time the enemy ship breached its aperture, and much of the transmission is lost. The general sensor outline of the vessel matches that of Hiver vessel, probably a Wrath cruiser judging by the size, but the exact details are unable to be confirmed.

On The Surface
Something has changed on the surface of Tango. The most likely explanation is that the Hivers have also landed troops, though no physical evidence of them has been seen. Long range scans for them prove ineffective, potentially because of so much of the paradoxical glass messing up the readings, but the shadows trapped within the planet's surface have changed. Before, there were uniformly humanoid, appearing around GREAT troopers and equipment at random.

Now some of them look like Hivers, and they fight within the Glass. Perhaps one in a hundred infantrymen have seen the events, but that's still more than enough to verify that it *is* occurring. Whatever group psychosis is taking place is evolving, as the shadow tribes of Human and Hiver forces form, meet, touch, and then explode into violence. Those who see watch as if in a daze, frequently only rousable through a heavy jostle, and are usually hard pressed to recount the exact events they witnessed.

It's a disturbing trend, and watch shifts are doubled with heavy drone patrols set out to very everything reported by organic troops. This planet was bizarre when they arrived, and it seems to only be getting worse.

The Gaian Regime has gained 1 Dominion at Tango

WTB: 10,000 Metals | 1 Organic per 1 unit has been bought out.

Event Outcome:
1. You have lost the black market bid, coming in third overall. You will receive no design credit for the black market tech next phase.

2. You have lost the bid for most interesting new technology. Honestly, I'm really kinda disappointed in this one. I looked forward to the looking glass, but the 5D manipulation is everything I said I didn't want. Its magical handwaving seems special at first, but then goes straight into mentioning 5D tools that solve the human element issue that made it interesting. It's capable of doing anything, with mentions of manipulating energy, mood, matter, and space - but without any hard context of the way this happens.

While I've hammered this idea into a place where I'm happy with giving it back to you, this was an opportunity to create something like the boredrive. A piece of impossible technology with a very specific effect that can, through cleverness, be leveraged to do many things within the rules of its operation. What you produced falls short of that, with a nebulous activation method, a drawback invalidated in the design itself, and effects so ill-defined that it could plausibly be argued to do anything.

If it makes you feel any better, I find the base idea more interesting than the other loser. I don't think you were trying for a universal handwavium device, you just didn't quite manage to translate your idea to the page.

Design Phase of Year 4
Resources
Dice: 5
T: 15405+ 3215
O: 52021 + 8460
M: 22659 + 13148
E: 12274 + 6393
S: 728 + 605

Testudo has Auto-Completed!

Spoiler: Active Projects (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Active Market Deals (click to show/hide)

Gaian Technology List
Gaian Empire Planner

Spoiler: Current Deployments (click to show/hide)

Kashyyk · « **Reply #498 on:** June 13, 2019, 07:25:40 am »

This turn went very well. We have no holes to fill, so I think we can afford to devote our time on extending our lead in Bore tech.

Quote from: Bore Drive 2nd gen. "Skip Drive"

The current bore drive is fat, power hungry and required a whole bunch of exotic particles. But it does find a way around the light-speed barrier, so at least there's that. We have made vast leaps in bore drive technology since, from PEBs and Death Rays to Gravity Drives and Blink.

By doubling down on our predictive algorithms and parallel processing, along with writing quantum on everything in red paint, the Skip Drive is without equal when it comes to short range bores. Incredibly fast calculation lets us perform rapid tactical manoeuvres at unprecedented speed, closing the gap in a stern chase or springing an ambush before the enemy has a chance to bore out.

For long range travel, the Skip Drive's parallel proposing allows it to rapidly chain bores, allowing a ship to porpoise between the stars faster than the current bore can calculate an equivalent solution for the entire distance. This will also enhance existing patrol strategies and react to light-speed delayed intelligence.

The focus on short range bores, along with our immense experience in designing bore drives should allow us to strip a lot of inefficiency compared to the current 1st gen. drive. Streamlining of production, fine-tuned tolerances and simplified design should produce a smaller, lighter, less energy-intensive and more resource efficient model than anything we field today.

The Skip Drive is innately speed 2, and comes in all sizes from Corvette to Battleship.

10ebbor10 · « **Reply #499 on:** June 14, 2019, 03:58:34 am »

Binary Bore Drive

Our current bore drives consist out of 2 major components. The actual bore drive, and the BoreNav system that feeds it it's information. The binary bore drive improves on this cobbled together mechanism by further specializing and integrating each of these two components.

The common bore drive is reduced to a series of spacial manipulators, similar in both form and function to an oversized Gravity drive. Equipped with only minimal processing power, this Spacial Manipulation Unit is no longer capable of boring independently, but it can make and sustain considerably more powerful spacial distortions for a prolonged period of time.

The Borenav retains it's former function as navigation calculator, but has now become an essential rather than optional component. In light of this, it has been given direct access to all the control links that were previously routed through the main bore drive, giving it superior access to the navigational sensors and central computing systems. Aside from improved efficiency, it's hoped that this direct access can also be used to dedicated Borenav computing power to other bore related problems throughout the ship.

During Jump procedures, the 2 systems work in concert, with the borenav feeding calculations directly to the spacial manipulation unit to be executed. Outside of jump procedures (or during part of the procedure that requires only 1 of the 2 systems, such as pre-jump calculation or post-jump reset), the two systems can provide additional functionality to the vessel. The spacial manipulation unit functions as a grav drive, while the quantum computer core provides a bonus to other bore related systems.

Powder Miner · « **Reply #500 on:** June 14, 2019, 04:38:20 pm »

"Alphabet Soup" Variable-"Push" Bore and Sublight Drive System

The design concept behind the Variable-"Push" Bore and Sublight Drive System, or VPBSDS, or the "alphabet soup drive" from some tongue-tied engineers, is simple. As someone pointed out: We can make our sublight drives push bores into existence, why not do it the other way around? Having a bore drive that also functions as a gravity drive might save space and it's always nice to get two functions out of one thing.

The VPBSDS is built to try and fit a speed 2 bore drive and a singular gravity drive into the space taken by an eco-bore drive, more or less. The way it works is that our normal bore drive is slimmed down some and brought up to par with our current bore calculation technology, creating a speed 2 bore drive that would be compact but not terribly special, considering the bore work we've done. (There are two variants planned -- the primary, cruiser drive and the smaller destroyer drive.)

Then the mechanism through which the bore drive punches a hole in space is given the same sort of extremely careful finesse we've built into the Gravity Drive's blink system, allowing the bore drive to either present a gravity well like a relatively strong Gravity Drive would, or to create a bore aperture, or to flow smoothly from the former to the latter like a gravity drive can. Thanks to our previous work on the Improved Blink, as well, there shouldn't be a significant wait time between opening a bore and operating the Alphabet Soup as a gravity drive.

Powder Miner · « **Reply #501 on:** June 14, 2019, 05:56:28 pm »

Quote from: Borebox

Skip Drive: (0)
Binary Bore Drive: (0)
"Alphabet Soup" Variable-Push Bore and Sublight Drive System: (1) Powder Miner

Kashyyk · « **Reply #502 on:** June 14, 2019, 06:28:33 pm »

I feel the tactical benefit from the Skip Drive (enabling faster resolution of bore chases amongst other things) outweighs the Alphabet Soup and Binary Bore, especially as most of our doctrine involves repeatedly boring, so the ability to use the drive/computer for other things doesn't really give us much of a benefit.

Quote from: Borebox

Skip Drive: (1) Kashyyk
Binary Bore Drive: (0)
"Alphabet Soup" Variable-Push Bore and Sublight Drive System: (1) Powder Miner

Powder Miner · « **Reply #503 on:** June 14, 2019, 06:52:59 pm »

What the Alphabet Soup in particular does is provide a lot of potential capacity for our ships -- not only shrinking the bore drive itself, but removing the power and capacity needs of a gravity drive, allowing us to put more stuff in. Capacity and its relationship to power and to bore drives and gravity drives in particular has been an obstacle that we've run up against time and time again when trying to make ship variants, like with the Pacemaster and with the Crowd Control Foray and with defending the Expedition, and we'll probably run up against it with the Anvil too, and I'd really like to deal with it.

SamSpeeds · « **Reply #504 on:** June 14, 2019, 10:50:49 pm »

Quote from: Borebox

Skip Drive: (1) Kashyyk
Binary Bore Drive: (0)
"Alphabet Soup" Variable-Push Bore and Sublight Drive System: (2) Powder Miner, SamSpeeds

I really like the Skip Drive but capacity is cool

10ebbor10 · « **Reply #505 on:** June 14, 2019, 11:31:50 pm »

Quote from: Borebox

Skip Drive: (2) Kashyyk,10ebbor10
Binary Bore Drive: (0)
"Alphabet Soup" Variable-Push Bore and Sublight Drive System: (3) Powder Miner, SamSpeeds,10ebbor10

Xvareon · « **Reply #506 on:** June 15, 2019, 12:26:07 am »

WRAPS - Water Recycling And Purification System

The WRAPS was created with one truth in mind: Water. Is. Life. You run out, or you get forced to drink unsafe sources, and everything's gonna fall apart faster than manslaughter on Black Friday. Even on worlds where water is common, very, very little of it is actually clean and potable. Salt, chemicals, diseases; anything could be hiding in what looks like good ol' sweet blue. With this in mind, we wanted something that could work just as well on long-distance space exploration as it would in terrestrial bunkers, or during any protracted period of drought where water conservation is an absolute must.

WRAPS works on the simple principle of distillation, by using an old-fashioned Stirling engine geared towards mechanical vapor recompression. First, water is loaded into its internal tank, either with whatever buckets are at hand, or with the attached liquid vacuum hose. WRAPS then converts the water into vapor, collects it at a high density, then reconstitutes it back into liquid, while at the same time passing energy back to the original source that lies in its tank to repeat the process. The result is a filter-less system that can extract pure water from pretty much anything that's wet: urine; seawater; farm & swamp runoff; and so on. Any contaminants like salts and algae get left behind in the bottom of the tank, which just needs to get cleaned out once every month or so (maybe more if Joe from accounting's been hitting the good stuff). WRAPS can run on most commercially-available power sources; hell, in best conditions, it needs less than a kilowatt to do its job. A job that makes roughly 1,000 liters of pure water in continuous operation for a whole day. That's enough for over a hundred people -- and that's counting cooking, cleaning, and other important things we all take for granted sometimes.

The whole unit looks sort of like a six- to seven-foot hexagonal drum. By its very nature, the unit should be both inexpensive and easily mass-produced. We expect this to have a noticeable impact right off the bat in emergency shelters, hospitals, and fortified positions. Everyone's healthier, but also feels safer when they know their water's clean. And that doesn't just mean we tamp down on disease; that also means our people can have some real hope to cling to when things get real dark. And out here in the Black, it can get plenty dark.

Kashyyk · « **Reply #507 on:** June 15, 2019, 01:13:00 am »

The Skip drive also reduces capacity, both by standard tech miniaturisation and by only performing short range bores. Combining a grav drive with a bore drive does theoretically provide more space, but that's only assuming we don't need to use both a grav drive and a bore drive at the same time, like all of our current combat doctrine requires.

We'd have to either change to a less maneuverable doctrine, or add a grav drive, which defeats the point of combining them in the first place. The only ships that would definitely benefit are ones that don't really move, like transports in the far field. But our pacemaster already has sublight drives baked in.

Powder Miner · « **Reply #508 on:** June 15, 2019, 02:01:24 am »

The combined drive isn't meant to replace every single grav drive, just to replace one -- which may not seem like a big deal, but considering that that is a full third of the grav engines on even the Galactica, and that Forays usually use one gravity drive, this should free up a significant amount of space even if the drive is not much smaller than the native bore drive -- but considering our bore experience and that size is the most major component of the bore drive, I expect it will be. But even getting rid of the space of one gravity engine makes a difference with how starved for it we constantly are; our expeditions would be able to get one additional defensive measure, something they desperately need.

Now, the Foray would be the most at risk to actually lose out on using gravity and bore drive at the same time, but the mechanism at the end of my design is created precisely to deal with that problem by obviating the need to use both bore and sublight drives simultaneously by simply moving the bore to take the Foray in. This would have the secondary effect of making ALL of our bore actions faster much like the Skip Drive would aim to do anyway -- considering how important acceleration into bores is, I would suggest putting such a design facet on the Skip Drive, considering what its role is supposed to be.

Therefore every ship would benefit from this particular aspect of design except for, in the most niche situations, the Foray, but even that I would expect to be a minor issue at most -- the only maneuvers I can really think of this failing for (things like the Epee deployment last battle and using the bore drive defensively) are maneuvers the Foray is a lot less likely to be pulling in the first place since the greater shadow of the Expedition allows the former to happen and we've never pulled off the latter because we've been using our bore drives for movement anyway -- which shouldn't be adversely affected thanks to the drive's track.

(Oh, and the Alphabet Soup also provides synergy with the Wave Motion Gun, as it provides one additional gravity drive for purposes of charging the gun or moving while firing the gun on ships we equip with it -- considering how carefully we need to always count our gravity drives to fit them on our ships, ships like the Anvil would benefit greatly in their Wave Motion Gun usage from having it.)

10ebbor10 · « **Reply #509 on:** June 15, 2019, 02:10:25 am »

Quote from: Xvareon on June 15, 2019, 12:26:07 am

WRAPS - Water Recycling And Purification System

The WRAPS was created with one truth in mind: Water. Is. Life. You run out, or you get forced to drink unsafe sources, and everything's gonna fall apart faster than manslaughter on Black Friday. Even on worlds where water is common, very, very little of it is actually clean and potable. Salt, chemicals, diseases; anything could be hiding in what looks like good ol' sweet blue. With this in mind, we wanted something that could work just as well on long-distance space exploration as it would in terrestrial bunkers, or during any protracted period of drought where water conservation is an absolute must.

WRAPS works on the simple principle of distillation, by using an old-fashioned Stirling engine geared towards mechanical vapor recompression. First, water is loaded into its internal tank, either with whatever buckets are at hand, or with the attached liquid vacuum hose. WRAPS then converts the water into vapor, collects it at a high density, then reconstitutes it back into liquid, while at the same time passing energy back to the original source that lies in its tank to repeat the process. The result is a filter-less system that can extract pure water from pretty much anything that's wet: urine; seawater; farm & swamp runoff; and so on. Any contaminants like salts and algae get left behind in the bottom of the tank, which just needs to get cleaned out once every month or so (maybe more if Joe from accounting's been hitting the good stuff). WRAPS can run on most commercially-available power sources; hell, in best conditions, it needs less than a kilowatt to do its job. A job that makes roughly 1,000 liters of pure water in continuous operation for a whole day. That's enough for over a hundred people -- and that's counting cooking, cleaning, and other important things we all take for granted sometimes.

The whole unit looks sort of like a six- to seven-foot hexagonal drum. By its very nature, the unit should be both inexpensive and easily mass-produced. We expect this to have a noticeable impact right off the bat in emergency shelters, hospitals, and fortified positions. Everyone's healthier, but also feels safer when they know their water's clean. And that doesn't just mean we tamp down on disease; that also means our people can have some real hope to cling to when things get real dark. And out here in the Black, it can get plenty dark.

I think you may be mistaken about what arms race you're posting in.

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Author Topic: The Gaian Regime Empire Thread | Terrans | GalactiRace (Read 46465 times)

Draignean

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andrea

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Draignean

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Kashyyk

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10ebbor10

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Powder Miner

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Powder Miner

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Kashyyk

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Powder Miner

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SamSpeeds

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10ebbor10

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Xvareon

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Kashyyk

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Powder Miner

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10ebbor10

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