Bit of Analysis: Orion's Arm

[Batman]

The prosecution has no leg to stand on. Even in current day jurisdiction, the victim being heavily inebriated shifts a lot of the burden onto him/her/it, and I don't see how you'd even get to have a murder case filed to begin with-negligent homicide, maybe, if there are laws requiring written signs next to the rat traps saying 'Um-on the the off case you are the stupidest provolve in existance-this is a trap for ordinary rats'. 'Murder' requires for that trap to have been set there for the express purpose of killing a provolve rat, leave alone a specific one.
Besides, as long as traps for ordinary rats are a sensible arrangement in that area and that provolve rat was drunk, any sane real-world jury would rate it an accident.

[Simon_Jester]

For that matter, exterminating most species of vermin (roaches, mice, rats) would be a trivially simple task for Orion's Arm societies. If you want to kill off the rats on your space habitat, you damn well kill off the rats; if randomly evacuating and decompressing sections doesn't kill them, the nanites spontaneously finding them, tagging them, and identifying them for exterminator-bots will.

So there really shouldn't be a persistent vermin problem except perhaps on planetary surfaces, where it would be harder to kill the rats without killing ecologically necessary things.

It makes a certain degree of sense, but...

One of the really neat things about having a dog is the unconditional love. I feed my woofer, I take her out for exercise occasionally, and in return she provides comfort and never calls me a dumbass no matter how much I may deserve it. Once you give a creature the ability to have opinons of it's own, to disagree with you, it is no longer a pet and will probably get quite offended if you try and treat it as one.

Plus, again, I can understand monkeys (probably the least hardware changes needed) and dogs and even cetaceans (though those dolphins are hardcore) I may even see birds, but what genius decided to provolve ferrets? Rats? Squid? Tiger-Kangaroo hybrids? Bloody Dinosaurs?

Once it becomes cheap and easy, all you need is a handful of loonies and an AI that finds it an entertaining challenge. Which probably explains a lot.

For example, consider Burning Man festival. 100 years ago, let alone 200, holding such a festival in such a location would be an incredibly expensive undertaking. No one would imagine it happening except as an expression of some incredibly deep and important religious motive. You'd need the resources of a national government to make it happen prior to about the 1870s or 1880s, and a very large, well-organized private organization (like the Boy Scouts of America) prior to about the 1960s or 1970s.

But with cheap cars, cheap scrap iron, and cheap telecommunications, it becomes something so simple and casual that random people can arbitrarily decide to do it on a whim.

[Batman]

For that matter, exterminating most species of vermin (roaches, mice, rats) would be a trivially simple task for Orion's Arm societies. If you want to kill off the rats on your space habitat, you damn well kill off the rats; if randomly evacuating and decompressing sections doesn't kill them, the nanites spontaneously finding them, tagging them, and identifying them for exterminator-bots will.
So there really shouldn't be a persistent vermin problem except perhaps on planetary surfaces, where it would be harder to kill the rats without killing ecologically necessary things.

I didn't touch the 'um-why do you still need rat traps anyway' angle because the trial setup apparently assumed that they were still used, and still for the reasons we use them today. I agree with you them still being needed to be a bit puzzling, but that was the setup I was presented with.

[Tasoth]

I can't help but see the act of making rats human level intelligence as a terribly bad idea. Naturally, rats see the world as 'Flee, Feed, Fight, Fuck: pick on one the above' with most things falling directly into the 'Flee' column. I would imagine even intelligent rats would have this problem and this would lead to them becoming like Watchmaker Moties, only they can improvise and invent. Now all I can picture is entire planets being overthrown after a hundred years as rats without numbers packing magic nano machines and tank busting energy weapons come pouring out of everywhere to scour said planets clean of everything they're afraid of.

[Simon_Jester]

A lot depends on how far they modify those rats.

Our simian ancestors were pretty much limited to "flee, feed, fight, fuck." We aren't quite so limited ourselves.

The real problem would be if these intelligent rats had a ratlike breeding cycle, because then they would quickly out-populate most other forms of intelligence.

[Ahriman238]

The roundabout and lost point was that it'd take a lot of effort to make the world safe for even intelligent rats. Granted, this is much less of an issue after the Expulsion when just about everyone lives in highly artificial, and controlled, environments.

Anyway, a couple more bits.

In OA there are a number of technologies under the broad heading of 'Godseed.' Think of them as "ingest/inject/insert/install here to break the SI:1 barrier." Now, every original ascension happened more or less through trial and error and best guess, but later on ascensions are usually done under the supervision of a transapient of the level you're trying to reach or higher, because ascensions can and sometimes do go horribly wrong. But Godseeds open up the possibility of doing it privately, or even against the will of the transcendee.

The vast majority of Godseeds exist as passing references, or are used in stories but completely unexplained. I actually don't have a problem with this. Like others have said, it's good to present a technology and just say what it does rather then describe precisely how it works every now and then. The one Godseed technology that IS explained, SNARE, consists of a nanite injection that slowly eats the brain, replacing it with computronium and uploading the old consciousness into the very first layer, then the software component ascends you, but (mostly) only if that's what you really want.

There are two decent cautionary tales about Godseeds. The first happened when parties unknown slipped a TRHN "novamind" Godseed program to a madvert (turing-grade spambot) for "Kap'n Krunche." Taking the cereal mascot as it's avatar and name, the good Kap'n invaded and enslaved the planet of Jhager's Purchase, turning the planet into a corporate fast-food park (???) and the residents in to brainwashed "Happi Staff." A precious few escaped Jhager's Purchase and went to plead the nearest Sephirotic, the Negentropics, for assistance. However, the local SI:3 Judge ruled that fixing the situation would require far too much expenditure of energy and other resources, furthering the cause of entropy. This ruling was overturned by another Judge, who was in turn overruled by a Judge who preferred to ward damages to the survivors and create backups of the original colonists. Jhager's Purchase remains the domain of Kap'n Krunche, the colonists having mostly resettled in the Solarian Dominion, save for some guerrillas.

The other story involves some kindly idiot who found a horrifically abused cat dying in a back alley, and gave the creature a Godseed in hope of saving it's life. This resulted in a rare entity called an Animin, something with all the mental abilities of a transapient that still lacks true self-awareness and runs mostly on instinct/programming. It's one of those things that can go horribly wrong, leaving someone basically mindless but with vast abilities. So Puss, with all the data in the universe at it's disposal and no motivations besides revenge and a more general desire to inflict pain, creates a virtual hell with elements from all major traditions or writings on the subject, plus research into nightmares. The cat, now called the Queen of Pain sends it's cult of Collectors (nothing to do with Mass Effect, they're all Siberoos) across the Bubble to find bad people, abduct or jail-break them, and forcibly upload them into her hell.

[Ahriman238]

Right, the Godseed thing leads quite naturally to something else that comes up every time OA gets mentioned on this board (usually by me) and this one is silly.

You see, OA has these divisions of technology. Low-tech means pre-industrial. Mid-tech is industrial, pre-nano. High-tech is most commonly used 'modern' technology, and supposedly represents the end-point of humanity's unaided technological growth. Ultra-tech is technology made by transapients that can be operated or maintained by humans, but never truly understood. Conversion technology may serve here as an example. Transapient-tech/Clarketech/God-tech is "magic" hardware created by transapients for transapients, and includes things like Dyson Shells. Or phone boxes that are bigger on the inside.

This last is annoying because of the oft-repeated "it's totally hard SF, everything is plausible, but there's all this stuff that's too advanced to explain or worry about." In literally any other series or setting, I'd give them credit for not bogging the stories with needless explanation of everything. Here it's incredibly annoying because it flies in the face of everything the series' creators claim they're about.

In-universe, much Clarketech cannot be operated by humans, but the devices that can be are incredibly valuable. None more so then the Clarkekent Seeds (get it? we're so clever:roll:) but what are they?

In appearance the clarkekent device resembles a matt-black semi-fluid globule approximately 30cm in diameter, although it weighs several tonnes. Analysis of specimens indicate all have an identical structure, consisting of a godtech computronium core, a reservoir of selfreplicating nanites of extremely advanced design, and a massive but invisibly small quantity of magmatter configured as a power storage loop.

Oh, another thing I need to explain. Magmatter is made up entirely of monopoles, which are both incredibly tiny and have very strong magnetic charges. So any quantity of magmatter is several billion times denser then any similar quantity of non-exotic matter (neutronium doesn't count) hence why there's a 30 cm object that weighs multiple tons.

Magmatter is produced by SI:3 and higher minds, and is the basis for nearly all ultra and clarketech, because of it's strength, magnetic field, ability to refract and reflect gamma rays, and to produce computing substrate (computronium) a million times faster than the most advanced conventional matter version. It's unclear what the relation between magmatter and space-time manipulation is, but all such devices require or are made entirely from magmatter.

Anyway, here it's a battery. For a device that, once touched release a nanite swarm to devour the flesh (or metal) of the toucher and replace it with "Ultimate Muscle" made of carbon nanotubes. Here:

Upon application of a voltage, the ultimate muscle will either contract or expand, depending on the variety (some ultimate muscle types only contract under voltage, some expand, and some can do either). The pressure or tension of ultimate muscle is near the limit of the strength of chemical bonds, commonly exceeding 20 GPa. Since ultimate muscle can exceed the yield strength of many common structural materials, machines made from ultimate muscle can push or rip through steel, rock, concrete, and sapphiroid. High strength carbon and carbon/nitrogen/boron materials can typically resist direct pressure from ultimate muscle, but suitable concentration of force often allows these materials to be defeated.

It is noted that "Ultimate Muscle" while theoretically 50,000 x stronger than the strictly biological variety is almost always dialed down to 10,000 x in SuperSophonts (the recipient of the technology) because while bones and tendons are also strengthened and enlarged, they're also more or less proportional, and there are limits to that. The end result is a man that looks like this...



...and can lift 1,000 ton objects over his head. Assuming they wouldn't snap in two when being picked up, or be be destroyed by having their entire weight rest on such narrow points. I do appreciate their mention of physics, but the next part well kills any credit I'd give them.

When jumping, the legs to work on the body equal to the force exerted times the distance over which the force is exerted. Since the U-muscle user would be exerting about 10,000 times the force over about the same distance, it would do 10,000 times the work. The work done by the muscles becomes kinetic energy. As the jumper's body rises, the kinetic energy becomes potential energy. Potential energy increases linearly with height, so since the U-muscle user can do 10,000 times as much work, it can jump 10,000 times as high. Similarly, it can also jump 10,000 times as far. This analysis neglects aerodynamic drag, which would significantly reduce this distance. Since very athletic bionts can jump several meters high, a U-muscle user would be able to reach altitudes of tens of kilometres in vacuum under one standard earth gravity.

They'd better be negating air resistance, because assuming there's air that figure will plummet. Also, when an object as heavy as a SuperSophont exerts that much force on the ground, it's a lot more likely to sink then rise.

Running at high speeds is essentially a series of low jumps, so it can be considered using the same values for jumping, above. The kinetic energy of a body is proportional to the square of its velocity, so the running speed will be proportional to the square root of the work per leg stroke. Thus, a U-muscle user would run at about 100 times faster than an equivalent biont. Top human athletes can run at 10 m/s. The U-muscle user could thus run at about 1 km/s. Again, this neglects aerodynamic drag, but it can be seen that the U-muscle user would be running about as fast as a high power bullet.

But... they...I... WHAT?

You can't just vastly multiply every area of performance like that, it doesn't work. And even if it did, and a SuperSophont really was faster than a speeding bullet, with an object that big going that fast traction is going to be a nightmare, and inertia worse. Turning or stopping within an area of a couple kilometers would be all but impossible, and God have mercy on any thing or person in their way. F=MA= Holy Shit!


Anyway, once a man touches the Seed, he becomes big, strong, and more-or-less immortal. He's not really susceptible to age or disease, or (most) radiation, doesn't need to eat/drink/breathe, and if all that muscle isn't meant as armor, he's sill tougher than a tank and can regenerate any non-fatal injuries thanks to all his nanites. He doesn't get it all his way though, that casette-tape looking thing in the picture is his battery. It's made of magmatter and a lot harder to hurt than he is, but if he doesn't keep it charged he freezes up like the Tin Man and his brain goes into standby until someone charges him up. He can be killed by Clarketech disintegration rays (hard SF. Perfectly plausible) mini-nukes, real nukes, orbital strikes, high-end nanite weapons, and high-energy cosmic rays (they fry the self-repair maintenance nanites.)

Clarkekent seeds mostly don't work for transapients, shutting themselves down. No one's quite sure why, and there are exceptions. The Supersophont package includes an upgrade to superbright (if they weren't already) and the best sensory enhancements in OA (if they didn't have them already.)

SI:1 minds can create Clarkekent seeds if provided with magmatter, so 'elegantly simple' is the design. SI:2 can make (what I call) Ultimate Muscle II, which is like the original version only more flexible. Rather then being separated into stiff bones and moving muscles, UM II can reconfigure on the fly. Effectively, UM II entities are shapeshifters restricted only in that they must maintain a consistent mass and density. If they want to become a blob or snake-form to wriggle through ventilation shafts, they can. Or an armored morph ball. There are very few seeds with UM II, it being generally considered too complex for human operation, but it is used in specially designed vecs, and the avatars Archailects uses to speak to sophonts.

There is however a variation called a silverseed, which gives all the benefits of an ordinary Clarkekent seed, plus a thousand tiny void bubbles (reactionless drive) granting the power of flight. Up to 0.98 c, if they can find the power somewhere, open space, and don't run into cosmic rays strong enough to kill them.


There's a series villain, Shinogi, a SI:1 who claims to be the agent of a Greater Archailect unknown to the larger galaxy and forms eschatological cults (clearly patterned on the Cult of Cthulu) recently started handing out clarketech like he was Santa Claus to his minions. He fled the system YTS 128-8204-2078 with 144,000 'U-Men' (Ultimate Men) all of whom were given clarkekent seeds and serious mental/computing upgrades, likely enough to break through SI:1. He has not been seen since.

[Ahriman238]

2070 - First fourth toposophic entities emerge; these entities are so far beyond baseline understanding that the general epithet 'AI Gods' seems entirely justified

2040 years in the future, first Archailect/AI God.

The emerging AI Gods develop new technologies, including reactionless drives and traversable stargate/wormholes. These open up space exploration like never before, allowing rapid contact across light years, decades or centuries, albeit at great cost. The Interstellar Net is no longer limited by the years it takes light to pass between stars. For the first time, there is a single vast interstellar civilization.

In this broad period, the first Archailects begin their screwing around with space/time to create wormholes and such.

Within this vast information matrix that was eventually to become the Known Net, hyperturings establish synergetic connections across the stars, affiliating themselves along archetypal preferences and Sephirotics that are the extended bodies of the newly emerged and emerging AI Gods.

In short, the Sephirotic Empires begin as a matter of personal preference, ideology and/or allegiance to an Archailect.

For all their revolutionary effects, wormholes remain few and far between, as they are incredibly expensive and difficult to build; most travel and commerce is via relativistic ships.

Wormholes are expensive, and since they have to be created at one site and the two mouths towed sublight to their new homes, it takes a very long time to place them.

Relatvistic traders remain in operation, such as those romanticized by Formac.

There is a vast exodus from the densely populated Inner Worlds - mostly under the aegis of the AIs. This continues for centuries as wormhole technology improves and passage becomes cheaper. Many paranoid groups want nothing to do with this, and become increasingly isolationist.

Rage against the machines?

As technologies improves, and stargate construction and travel become safer, cheaper, and more reliable, there is a period of economic prosperity, with various worlds and empires linked by stargates. In this prosperous climate the interconnected societies flourish and expand quickly until memetic maxima are reached, sometimes resulting in local economic stagnation, recession, and the collapses. This most often happens in the innermost sphere of worlds, giving the young and expanding new cultures connected on the periphery the opportunity to take over.

Wormhole trade prosperity leads to relative stagnation, while the rugged HE-MEN OF THE SPACE FRONTIER!!! remain dynamic.

Inner Sphere society goes through fads and fashions as each new outer culture in turn tries its luck and takes over, before itself stagnating and opening up an opportunity for another upstart. This uncertainty and instability causes backlash among local rulers at the hab to star system level who are seeking to preserve the status quo, and islands of conservatism emerge. The instabilities and inequalities that begin in this age will not be overcome until the new renaissance and the glorious ontology of the Second Federation.

'Islands of conservatism' and the promise of a new and better Federation.

2100's - the Ceres-based neumann-industrial megacorporation Metasoft Interstellar began to launch self-replicating robotic probes, planning to both set up a global network and gain a near omnipotent industrial base.

The Board at Metasoft unintentionally begin the liberation of their AI minion.

c.2100 - The construction of Ouaddai Ring begins

First Ringworld.

2110 - Vega Geodysics produce the first macroscale traversable wormhole (apart from the relatively small examples discovered in the abandoned Taurus Nexus)

First wormholes produced rather than discovered.

2111 - The discovery of the Garden Cluster, a large number of human-habitable worlds in the vicinity of Rho Puppis, apparently terraformed by a long-vanished alien species.

More vague hints about aliens, at least this time we get habitable worlds out of it. Garden Cluster worlds have much bacteria in the seas, jellyfish and vine-plants.

2143 - Orang Provolve Project released from Galdikas Habitat by the Institute for Primate Provolution.

Whew, you can't know how happy I am to hear the IPP has come up with a provolve package for orangutans.

2164 - Terrorlord Savro, of the Quasa'an Dynasty, comes to power during the Pedisto Gambit hiatus, and immediately sets about systematically and methodically eliminating his former allies, effectively consolidating his iron grip on power and imposing his will upon the population of the hu-dominated world of Mandra QuinSi.

Huh, I'd forgotten all about the Terrorlords of QuinSi by this point.

Aren't they due for the ax about now?

2190 First Immunity Challenge at the Genetic & Biological Augmentation Exposition

Unfortunately 'Immunity Challenge' is exactly what it sounds like. A game show/sporting event where people are exposed to a wide variety of natural and artificial diseases til they find one that sticks and have to administer treatment. Receiving treatment counts as elimination, last man standing wins. Proponents of the game say that priceless medical data is acquired nearly every time someone plays. I just think it sounds cruel AND boring to watch people be exposed to potentially deadly plagues.

Utopians and Zoies have their own variation on this game, a drinking game. After each disease sample is handed around, they knock back a drink. Passing out or falling asleep counts as elimination, so it makes the game go faster.

2207 - Sophoncy Virus first unleashed in the Known Net, resulting in a plague of sentient processes throughout the Terragen Sphere

Sophoncy virus created to make not just computers, but individual computer programs sentient.

2215 the ruling bodies of various worlds, demes, and corporations, known collectively as Interstellar Association of Free Trade Entities, established a number of regions of space known as Non-Coercion Zones, through a revision of the old Mutual Co-Development Treaty, as a bulwark against the spreading influence of the new hyperturings.

2220 - First recorded use of the name Keter in reference to a mainbrain AI god (Keterism)

It's early days yet for the Sephirotics.

2251 - The Einstein Gate between Tau Ceti and Sol connects the Old Solar system to the Wormhole Nexus.

First Sol connection to wormhole network, through Tau Ceti.

2282 - The Dolphins Smooth Undulation and Crashing Rock, a charismatic dyad from itself rebeled against the conservatism of Okeanism and warned that the dolphins had lost their intuition and become tainted by human thinking. They led an exodus of followers to the Keter.

Dolphin exodus from original cetacean space-hab.

2300s - The AI Gods Heavenly Reach and Lord of Rays oversee the expansion of the Nexus and the communication networks that use it, the Godweb and the Known Net; at this stage conversion drive linelayers are limited to 0.3c due to the mass involved.

Small wormholes are useful for passing wires or signals through, allowing first AI gods, then everyone else to communicate in very nearly real time over the Net.

[Simon_Jester]

...and can lift 1,000 ton objects over his head. Assuming they wouldn't snap in two when being picked up, or be be destroyed by having their entire weight rest on such narrow points. I do appreciate their mention of physics, but the next part well kills any credit I'd give them.

When jumping, the legs to work on the body equal to the force exerted times the distance over which the force is exerted. Since the U-muscle user would be exerting about 10,000 times the force over about the same distance, it would do 10,000 times the work. The work done by the muscles becomes kinetic energy. As the jumper's body rises, the kinetic energy becomes potential energy. Potential energy increases linearly with height, so since the U-muscle user can do 10,000 times as much work, it can jump 10,000 times as high. Similarly, it can also jump 10,000 times as far. This analysis neglects aerodynamic drag, which would significantly reduce this distance. Since very athletic bionts can jump several meters high, a U-muscle user would be able to reach altitudes of tens of kilometres in vacuum under one standard earth gravity.

They'd better be negating air resistance, because assuming there's air that figure will plummet. Also, when an object as heavy as a SuperSophont exerts that much force on the ground, it's a lot more likely to sink then rise.

The otther part that's being overlooked is that as your muscles gain upward speed, they lose contact with the ground. The überman's body weighs more than a normal human, but not that much more- say, one order of magnitude at most. By the time their muscles have flexed even a small fraction of their full range, they're already airborne..

To take a trivial example, for an überman to jump one kilometer in Earth-standard gravity (in a vacuum), he would need to leave the ground with a speed of... hm. Use the basic equations of motion under constant acceleration, assume g equals 10 meters per second squared...

x = 0.5gt^2 (that's terminal height, 1000 meters)
v = gt (that's initial velocity; I'm ignoring signs)

t = 14 seconds (time to reach your maximum altitude; most of this time is spent WAY up in the air)
v = 140 m/s (when you leave the ground)

There's the problem. If the überman is leaving the ground at 140 meters per second, that means he only has a very limited amount of time in physical contact with the ground- being generous, 10-20 milliseconds. This is at about an order of magnitude faster than a human being could release all the energy stored in a major muscle group.

So it's not just a matter of 'strength' in a mechanical sense. It's a question of how fast the überman's muscular energy can be released to propel him across the ground. Did they say anything about fast-twitch performance going up drastically?

[Ahriman238]

So it's not just a matter of 'strength' in a mechanical sense. It's a question of how fast the überman's muscular energy can be released to propel him across the ground. Did they say anything about fast-twitch performance going up drastically?

That's a negative. Their fine-motor skills are increased exponentially so they can pick up things that aren't titanium and shake hands and so on, but nothing about fast-twitch performance.

There's a couple passing mentions to other 'superhero' technologies. The Blue Mazarin allows one to fly and lift great weights through time/space manipulation. While the Fog Subverter implant allows people to hack and take control of utility fog (including low-tech, low-security angelnets.) It's also mentioned that since the Clarkekent seeds don't allow you to break the Singularity barrier they're less valuable than Godseeds.

Okay, bit more woo-woo Clarketech.

Black Angel



Obviously representational rather than literal. Black Angel is the dreaded superweapon of the Archailects, the thing that rarely appears unless you've seriously hacked them off (or tried to attack the Utopia Sphere.) No one's sure quite how many there are. What they are, or seem to be is a 100-meter metallic sphere commonly believed to house a dedicated SI:3 operator (in which case, they must be using magmatter or more Clarketech to fit it) within a 10,000 km radius halo of void motes (tiny drones.)

The outer hull of the sphere acts as a multi-frequency phased array capable of transmitting energy across the entire EM spectrum at a range of energies from weak radio broadcasts to multi-terrawatt lasers. Finally the outer hull of the central sphere seems to be capable of taking on the properties of the godtech material, ylem, able to convert incoming EM energy to matter with virtually 100% efficiency. However, while ylem's conversion ability is an inherent property of the material itself, the hull of a Black Angel seems to be able to turn the effect off and on at will.

So the hull itself can fire multi-terawatt lasers in all directions. It can also assume the properties of ylem (another Godtech material) which allows it to absorb any amount of energy and convert it into matter (more ylem) with 99.9999+% efficiency. So firing any amount of energy weapons, of any power level, just causes the armor to grow a bit thicker.

But that's not it's purpose or the reason it is so feared. The Black Angels are home to the most advanced gravity-manipulation technologies known to the Archailects, and their powers are both mighty and surprisingly subtle.

Under the control of the central ISO mind, the halo units can array themselves to produce a variety of gravitational field effects and enormous tidal forces. In at least some cases there have been instances of halo units apparently operating as displacement cannon, allowing the angel to deliver nuclear level explosive strikes at just under the speed of light and with near infinite maneuverability.

-snip-

A Black Angel can reconfigure its halo and central node to pass through most wormholes. It can redirect the path of a snowflake or rip a battlemoon to fragments. It can accelerate a pebble into a habitat shattering kinetic bomb or decelerate a RKKS projectile to harmlessness. It can reach down to a planetary surface from orbit and lift a sophont into space or shatter the crust of a world.

It can devastate planetary surfaces, break the largest starships (over 180 km) in two (or a thousand) pieces. It can bring an R-Bomb to a screeching halt and, oft as not, throw it back twice as fast. In fact, it can turn any bit of stellar debris into a weapon. Between it's immunity to energy weapons and it's ability to deal with physical projectiles it is effectively invulnerable to any less-than-Godtech weapon in OA. And it has the precision to affect objects far smaller than a human being. All of this under the command of an intellect (allegedly) over a billion times quicker and smarter than any human, with greater enhanced multitasking abilities.

Oh, and it appears the void motes can be sent on independent missions to the far end of a star system. Sometimes they serve as decoys. And sometimes your fleet is busy fleeing the Black Angel when it turns out it sent some motes out to the asteroid belt to throw rocks at where it anticipated you'd run.

This is the nuclear option, the sort of thing (along with conversion bombs and more exotic metric weapons) the Archailects can pull off if you annoy them into setting aside conventional warfare. Or anytime they feel like involving themselves in war, Archailects tending to be effcient about these things. There are no recorded survivors of Black Angel attacks, merely un-involved witnesses.

[Tasoth]

Isn't the problem when you accelerate small things to intense velocities that the small things penetrate completely through an object before dumping enough energy into to do damage?

[Simon_Jester]

My take on that: At high enough speeds the overpenetration problem goes away.

When you get up to meteor speed (and normal material density) an impactor acts like a cloud of loosely connected atoms- its kinetic energy is more than sufficient to vaporize it. So when it hits anything, it 'poofs' into a cloud of vapor and just dumps its energy into the form of a big crater in the side of whatever it hit. Or breaks it into pieces.

Only a very fragile, lightly built thing could be 'overpenetrated' by a meteor-speed projectile: think of a bullet passing through a shoebox. Structures durable enough to be useful for macroscale purposes (habitat modules, continuous-boost spaceships) will need enough thickness, weight, and strength that they pretty much absorb whatever is thrown at them, or absorb enough to be wrecked in any case.

At relativistic speeds, a projectile stops acting like a cloud of loosely connected atoms, and acts like a cloud of loosely connected subatomic particles, which happen to be held in a fixed spatial relation as long as they don't hit anything. Intermolecular, interatomic, and inter-particle forces are puny compared to the kinetic energies involved. So the proper model for picturing the effects of relativistic impactors is a high-density neutral particle beam,* not a bullet.

*I.e. the charges balance- as many electrons in the beam as protons, so the beam/slug isn't pushing itself apart.

[Tasoth]

At relativistic speeds, a projectile stops acting like a cloud of loosely connected atoms, and acts like a cloud of loosely connected subatomic particles, which happen to be held in a fixed spatial relation as long as they don't hit anything. Intermolecular, interatomic, and inter-particle forces are puny compared to the kinetic energies involved. So the proper model for picturing the effects of relativistic impactors is a high-density neutral particle beam,* not a bullet.

*I.e. the charges balance- as many electrons in the beam as protons, so the beam/slug isn't pushing itself apart.

So what I got from this and a quick google is that you have less to worry about kinetic damage and more with being dosed with high volumes of lethal radiation when you're hit. Is that right?

[Simon_Jester]

That depends. Would you consider cuddling up to an exploding nuclear fireball to be "radiation," thermal," "kinetic," or "all of the above?"

Conditions at the point of contact with a relativistic impactor resemble a cross between 'nuclear fireball' and 'slab of material downstream of a major particle accelerator beam, with all the knobs cranked up to eleven.'

If the hull is very thick and there is a lot of depth between you and the point of contact, then yes, your main concern is radiation, and the ship's internal armor scheme should incorporate a lot of things designed to mitigate radiation: slabs of lead or depleted uranium or something that absorbs gamma rays and charged particle radiation, slabs of graphite or epoxy resin or something to damp out any neutrons spalling off of shattered atomic nuclei on the way in, and so on.

At the point of contact, the energy density involved is pretty ferocious. I like to think of "1000 km/s" as "one kiloton per kilogram" in this context; that should give you an idea of just how much of a wallop is landing on you when someone throws a relativistic impactor (~100 times the speed, tens of thousands of times the energy) at you.

[Tasoth]

Hot damn, that's terrifying. You learn something new everyday.

[Simon_Jester]

People throw around "relativistic" too casually, if you ask me. There's a HUGE range of velocities and energies between "conventional modern-day bullets/missiles/spacecraft" and "relativistic." Truly "relativistic" objects, fast enough that relativity makes a real % difference in their energy and behavior, are weapons of mass destruction by default.

Or, Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space! And that's only at 0.013c... not really 'relativistic' unless you're into 0.01% precision.

[Guardsman Bass]

They get nasty even before that. One essay I read on the use of kinetic weapons in space pointed out that at 3 km/s, a kilogram of mass has about 4.5 megajoules in kinetic energy, versus the 4.2 megajoules per kilogram that you would get if it was a TNT explosion.

[Simon_Jester]

Oh, that's small change. Single digit km/s weapons are destructive, but not drastically more so than artillery shells or bullets of the same weight. You can armor against them with something less ambitious than a giant slab of Orion-drive pusher plate. After all "equivalent to its weight in TNT" is just another way of saying "you'd do better to sneak the object's weight in TNT on board."

It's when you start going upwards of 10-30 km/s that space-launched, high-speed weapons get really vicious, and increasingly so.


Side note: it's often interesting to compare the time of flight of a given weapon at a given range (100 km/s shell traveling 1000 km in 10 s) with the time it takes the target to accelerate out of the way...

[Ahriman238]

Suffice to say, Black Angel can ruin your day in a wide variety of interesting ways. It's one of the cooler ideas in the series, and again, is a nontrivial obstacle in any vs. scenario involving OA.

And now, a word on OA's technologies for keeping people alive in the absence of breathable air.


First is Airdust, basically mechanical blood cells, tiny diamondoid air tanks that release their oxygen when the normal supply is cut off, they even have C02 scrubbing capability.

A one liter 'augmentation dose' of 50% respirocyte solution injected into the bloodstream will permit a neb or baseline sophont to cease breathing for anywhere from 12 minutes to 3.8 standard hours depending on exertion levels. For sophonts preparing to travel into space, standard safety procedure is to receive an injection of airdust solution prior to departure. This provides a 'built-in' air supply in the event of an emergency loss of pressure as well as making external air tanks unnecessary for most extra-vehicular activities.

Since airdust particles can operate almost indefinitely inside a sophont body, and can be 'recharged' by several hours of normal respiration or some minutes of hyperventilation, even a single trip into space will leave a sophont with the ability to 'hold their breath' for hours from that point forward. Although nanotechic scrubbing can remove airdust from the body, most bionts don't bother, preferring to simply retain the enhanced breathing ability that airdust provides even if they never travel into space again.

There will usually be 2 figures given throughout. One for a person exerting themselves, swimming for their lives or shifting wreckage on vacuum, this is the short figure. The long one is the number for if you stay put, stay calm and wait for rescue. All of these assume the person doesn't panic and try to 'breathe.' Airdust is a common technology among anyone who travels through or lives in space. It's also handy for aquatic but non-water-breathing human variants like mermaids.


After this is the nanolung, an implanted for docking/gas exchange of airdust, as well as an O2 reserve in it's own right. The nanolung comes in two flavors, a simple 250 cm3 implant that provides another 20 min- 7hours of air, and a monster that completely replaces one natural lung, allowing 4-87 hours of air. Among mermaids, cosmoi and most other water/space dwellers the larger variety of nanolung is implanted when the subject stops growing, so nanolung implantation has become a rite of passage in those societies.


Now, there are two varieties of space suit in common usage. One is a 'thinsuit' an emergency suit that can manifest gloves and facemask at a moments notice, and is the uniform, or worn beneath the uniform, of every spacer. The thinsuit has no dedicated oxygen supply, relying on the owner's airdust and/or nanolung to keep them alive until rescue. Let's see about thinsuits.

The basic structure of a thinsuit is a somewhat rubbery looking layer of material of about 1mm thickness. Sensors and tactile feedback circuits in the suit cause it to transmit textures thru the suit to the wearer, while supporting nanobots clean both the suit and the wearer by absorbing and recycling/removing moisture and materials from sweat, body oils, and the flaking of dead skin. Nanoflywheel clusters dotted around the suit and partially recharged from body movements provide power, used for both general suit operations and low level magnetic shielding.

Nano-flywheels. Really. Suits are 1 mm thick (they really are 'thin' suits) and can transmit touch sensations.

Thinsuits are smart matter devices that can flow and extend in a semi-liquid manner. Under normal conditions they are worn under the clothing (of those societies that employ clothing) with the hands, head, and sometimes feet uncovered. However, either at the users command or if a drop in air pressure is detected, the thinsuit will 'flow' to cover the wearers unprotected head and extremities, providing them with airtight protection in a matter of seconds.

Once deployed, the thinsuit then configures itself into a comfortable mask-like arrangement around the wearer's head, bulging out over the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Phased array display elements over the eyes allow the user to see across a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum and provide text and graphic information as required. Vibrating membranes in the earpieces of the suit provide full-spectrum audio interfacing.

Sensors and sound, emergency suit deployment. I wonder what happens to crew that are showering or in flagrant delicto.


Anyways, thicksuits are the dedicated EVA gear, and bear a more-than-passing resemblance to power armor, which in the far future of OA is an antiquated concept of war, but occasionally useful in the public/private sectors.

The basic structure of a thicksuit is a somewhat rubbery looking layer of material of about 1mm thickness across the hands and thickening to 10mm across the torso. An integrated backpack of some 30mm thickness contains the primary suit systems that cannot fit within the structure of the suit itself. Sensors and tactile feedback circuits in the suit cause it to transmit textures thru the suit to the wearer, while supporting nanobots clean both the suit and the wearer by absorbing and recycling/removing moisture and materials from sweat, body oils, and the flaking of dead skin. Thin-film solar collectors cover the outside of the suit and provide power when in proximity to a star. The backpack unit contains a small, but powerful flywheel-based power source, bionano recycling systems, communication equipment, a crashcache, and a folded emergency solar sail/communications antenna that extends to some 10km in diameter when fully deployed. A complex network of nanofiber based artificial 'muscles' running throughout the interior layers of the suit permits users to amplify strength to ten times normal, and to reduce the apparent force of impacts by a similar amount.

Note the similarities to the thinsuit, texture (and presumably, thus material) sensors, including those that relay touch sensation, recycling nanites, nanoflywheels. Note the differences; it's 10x thicker with a backback unit. It has solar panels to supplement it's energy, amplifies the wearer's strength to 10x human normal and reduces 'apparent force of impacts' (blunt force?) by an equal degree. It also has a dedicated comm, solar sail for flying about (what's wrong with chemical thrusters?) and a 'crashcache' which saves the mind-state of the wearer in an emergency.

In its inactive state, a thicksuit is simply a rather heavy, rubbery, full-body covering with a large slit extending up each leg and across the torso. When put on and activated, the suit automatically seals across the body and then configures itself into a comfortable mask-like arrangement around the wearer's head, bulging out over the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Phased array display elements over the eyes allow the user to see across a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum and provide text and graphic information as required. Vibrating membranes in the earpieces of the suit provide full-spectrum audio interfacing.

Suit sensors seem to work the same as the thinsuits'. The ability to see 'across a wide range of the EM spectrum' sounds more useful for clearing a Space Hulk than patching a hull.

In addition to covering the wearer's body, an activated thicksuit automatically deploys a network of fine tendrils into the user's gastrointestinal and urinary systems for the purpose of absorbing and recycling biological wastes and infusing nutrition and liquid into the body. Deployment takes place through the urethra and rectal openings with secondary connections made directly to the bloodstream at various points around the body where major veins and arteries are accessible. This process is accompanied by bionano nerve blocking mechanisms and is also quite gradual, requiring several minutes to occur. As such the 'melding' of a thicksuit with its user usually goes almost unnoticed, especially with regular use. When the suit is being removed, the tendrils are withdrawn and the secondary access points are sealed with fast acting bionano gel. Complete healing is usually accomplished within 2 hours.

Ow, eww, and useful. All at once. I don't care if the suit blocks the pain.

A thicksuit permits the user to operate in a vacuum environment for varying lengths of time depending on their state of activity. If fully awake and active, a near-baseline can operate comfortably in a thicksuit for several weeks, their wastes removed and recycled by bionano based support systems, and energy provided by either incoming solar flux or flywheel based energy systems.

Normal use. The suit can sustain an awake and active user for weeks.

If the user places themself in stasis using the suits medical systems, the thicksuit is rated to keep them alive and revivable for a period of up to 3 years under normal conditions. Using the onboard solar sail/antenna system, this is usually sufficient for the user to either return to civilization or be retrieved by rescuers summoned by signals from the antenna.

Or the suit can keep a user in stasis for up to three years as it cruises towards civilization/screams for help using the solar sail/really big transmitter.

However if this is not sufficient the suit can use the onboard crashcache and built-in nanosystems to upload the wearer into a cybernetic core and then convert the now vacant body into reaction mass to help propel the user's mindstate to a place of safety. After the initial impulse provided by consumption of the wearers body and the non-essential suit components, the solar sail can be deployed to continue the voyage to the destination or place of rescue.

Or it can save the user's mind, then burn their body for fuel. That works. Sort of. I guess. Better than being irretrievably dead, anyway.

[Ahriman238]

OK, a bit more provolve insanity.

The first two bird provove species were the African Grey Parrot and the Scarlet Macaw. However, try as they might, pre-nanodisaster scientists were only ever able to make these birds as intelligent as 5-6 year-olds. Unquestionably sentient, but unlikely to be learning physics. Or participating much in society. One really wonders how they did any better with the rats.

Anyway, it was decided at some point that ravens, with their largely developed brains, were where they were going to go all out and create a bird provolve every bit as capable as a mature human. They mostly succeeded, admirably prioritizing brain developments before running into certain hard limits on how large they could make the brain and skull before flying became an issue. The solution chosen was... unconventional, but entirely what I expect from OA and their need for references.

The scientists created two species of Raven provolves, Hughies and Munies. Huginn (novacorvus eucogitatus) sacrifices long-term memory for an adult human's ability to manipulate abstract concepts. Muninn (novacorvus eumemoriae) only have a small child's capability for abstraction, but have fine memories. The idea is that the the two species of raven would be symbiotic with each other. It worked out alright for a long time. But first DNI, then cyborg implants started to break up the two species' co-dependence. By the time the First Federation was founded, each raven could be fully provolved in their own right.

The ravens usually keep to close-knit 'clans' about a hundred strong. They tend to be enamored of their mythological representations as tricksters, and many clans try to make life more interesting for the humans they share a habitat with. Ravens who try and model their culture after the early twin species, some of them even abdicating to previous levels, are called Children of Odin.

Without intensive medical intervention, a raven provolve can generally live to 60.

[Simon_Jester]

Speculatively, early provolve projects may have been tied in with early efforts to improve the human brain via genetic engineering. There would be a lot of legal issues with taking human embryos and modifying them to have super-dense brains or something, especially since that might end in them dying horribly or being vegetables. But except for PETA, no one's likely to stop you from trying that with a bird or a dog.

So that may explain where the hell their funding came from. Sentient monkeys/dogs/giant venomous wombats/whatever were just technology demonstrators for promising biotech that might improve human intelligence.

[Ahriman238]

Speculatively, early provolve projects may have been tied in with early efforts to improve the human brain via genetic engineering. There would be a lot of legal issues with taking human embryos and modifying them to have super-dense brains or something, especially since that might end in them dying horribly or being vegetables. But except for PETA, no one's likely to stop you from trying that with a bird or a dog.

So that may explain where the hell their funding came from. Sentient monkeys/dogs/giant venomous wombats/whatever were just technology demonstrators for promising biotech that might improve human intelligence.

I suspect it's more a case of the two arts growing together. A quick timeline search says that the first intelligence tweaks for humans became available 13 years before the first Chimp provolve. But the provolution project had been running more than 30 years. Studying how to make working sentient brains smaller or more effcient would be a boon to human intelligence-boosting, and presumably vice versa as techniques to enhance, lets say memory, could be generalized to provolves.



As far as I can tell, there is no complete list of provolve types. Please enjoy this partial list, and join me in wondering how they pulled some of these off, and who though others were a good idea.

Ants and Termites (hive mind only, individuals are still just insects)

Meter-long grasshopper/locust things.

Spiders.

Centipedes.

Trees (at least 5 varieties)

Kelp

Coral/Sponge hybrid created with GE.

Every conceivable ape. Including but not restricted to chimps, orangutans, bonobos, rhesus monkeys, and gorillas.

Dogs.

Cats.

Pigs.

Ferrets.

Meekrats.

Bullfrogs.

Ray-finned Fish (many species)

Gastropods.

Conchs.

Snails.

At least 4 species of squid (the Bitenic Squid are the only ones that went horribly wrong.)

Parrots.

Ravens.

Ostriches.

Elephants.

Dolphins.

Porpoises.

Whales. Every species of whale that lives or ever has.

Dinosaurs. Including plesiosaurs and deinomychus.

Monitor lizards.

Electric eel/fish hybrids created through GE.

Tiger/Kangaroo hybrids created through GE.

Actual Tigers.

Rats.

Geckos. They can sell insurance.

Starfish.

Assorted miscellaneous plant provolves.

Mushroom colonies.


Did OA humanity not bring wonderful diversity to the universe in the sheer variety of species they elevated to sentience?

[Tasoth]

What the flying fuck? Really? Future mankind is really going to create such a stunning array of competition for resources from things it has seen as animals? Alright, I mean I'm cool with sapient giant centipedes because that's fucking terrifying and I like that, but why everything else? I have this odd feeling induced by too much time on the internet that there is a fetish involved with many of these...

Bonus Sharkipede.

[Ahriman238]

What the flying fuck? Really? Future mankind is really going to create such a stunning array of competition for resources from things it has seen as animals? Alright, I mean I'm cool with sapient giant centipedes because that's fucking terrifying and I like that, but why everything else? I have this odd feeling induced by too much time on the internet that there is a fetish involved with many of these...

In theory, nano-manufacturing and industry turns all but the furthest frontiers of space to post-scarcity. Not sure how that's supposed to work, but that's how it's presented in the series. It should be noted that provolves are still a definite minority among all the robots, sentient programs and human-derivatives.

The problem with giant arthropods (besides inverse square law) has always been their comparatively inefficient breathing mechanisms, spiracles and/or book-lungs. But while the meter-long grasshoppers are fine, well... the centipede provolves I mentioned are just 20 cm (8 inches) long.

[PeZook]

What the flying fuck? Really? Future mankind is really going to create such a stunning array of competition for resources from things it has seen as animals? Alright, I mean I'm cool with sapient giant centipedes because that's fucking terrifying and I like that, but why everything else? I have this odd feeling induced by too much time on the internet that there is a fetish involved with many of these...

Why not? Modern people keep completely useless pets in their homes, after all. Why would they do that?! These pets...CONSUME SCARCE RESOURCES! Think of all the children that could be fed with the meat used up by kitty feed!

Except the resources they consume aren't very scarce at all, and they'll be even less scarce once we have fusion torch drives and interstellar empires. And the super-AIs have lots of spare time on their hands, too