SDN Worlds 4 Commentary Thread V

[RogueIce]

So this means we need a different substance for our Green Lantern non-trademark infringing rings?

[Kartr_Kana]

Orichalcum, by its nature is a material that makes the universe LESS permeable to psychic emissions, not more. So no, no psychic bullets (and we'd be freaked out at the idea).

Sorry

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Hmmm maybe I can hire a Umerian MAAAD! Scientist and a Bragulan Scientist to create Repleted-Orichalcum which makes the universe MORE permeable to psychic emissions and then I can have my mind bullets!

[fgalkin]

Orichalcum, by its nature is a material that makes the universe LESS permeable to psychic emissions, not more. So no, no psychic bullets (and we'd be freaked out at the idea).

Sorry

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Hmmm maybe I can hire a Umerian MAAAD! Scientist and a Bragulan Scientist to create Repleted-Orichalcum which makes the universe MORE permeable to psychic emissions and then I can have my mind bullets!

You can try, but you'll still need to buy the space monster shits that are a vital component of the alloy

Lost mining= feeding a varying diet of asteroids to space monsters and collecting and processing the poop.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Karmic Knight]

So this means we need a different substance for our Green Lantern non-trademark infringing rings?

The #3A6629 Beacon Corps, coming to Paladin Labs, Impact Zone, Capital Planet, B10.

[Chaotic Neutral]

Sounds like the perfect thing to put on an anti-mothership warhead against the Karlacks.

No psychic power = No Overmind

Also, I can imagine it isn't something you would want near your exotic engines and power plants, what with all of the reality bending.

[Darkevilme]

Sounds like the perfect thing to put on an anti-mothership warhead against the Karlacks.

No psychic power = No Overmind

Also, I can imagine it isn't something you would want near your exotic engines and power plants, what with all of the reality bending.

No overmind means the karlack's true berserker fury is unleashed, great plan CN I expect nothing less from you. The Psychic influence of the Karlack aspects are basically the only thing stopping the Karlacks from running amock and trying to eat pretty much the entire galaxy.

Also CN as an addendum: Write some thrice bedamned story posts lest I take to heart the notion I have that your entire involvement in this game is nothing more than some elaborate trolling attempt.

[Chaotic Neutral]

No overmind means the karlack's true berserker fury is unleashed, great plan CN I expect nothing less from you. The Psychic influence of the Karlack aspects are basically the only thing stopping the Karlacks from running amock and trying to eat pretty much the entire galaxy.

And also completely destroy all cohesion and break any fleet into a disorganized mess, winning the other side a crushing victory.

[fgalkin]

Our reality bending is done by completely different means, so they work just fine. It DOES nullify our own psychic abilities, but that's the whole point.

And yes, you can make an orichalcum warhead (or an orichalcum bullet). They will be the most expensive warhead and bullet in the galaxy, respectively, but yes, it's possible.

You just have to hope that this missile that costs as much as a small starship doesn't miss or get shot down.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Chaotic Neutral]

You just have to hope that this missile that costs as much as a small starship doesn't miss or get shot down.
Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Decoys. Lots, and lots, and lots, of nuclear decoys.

[Siege]

And also completely destroy all cohesion and break any fleet into a disorganized mess, winning the other side a crushing victory.

And how on Earth do you propose to "destroy all cohesion" in an entire Hive Fleet with stuff so rare it costs a ton of gold per 100 grams, exactly?

I'm assuming Orichalcum just like BFEs, Null Fields, White Noise generators and other anti-psion technologies has its limits, i.e. it can be brute-forced with enough psionic mojo.

In effect what you're proposing to do is disrupt what's probably the hardest to disrupt telepathic bond in the galaxy with stuff so exotic you can't mass produce it, can't even get it from any source that isn't demons, and even assuming they wanna sell it to you is so hair-raisingly expensive it will bankrupt your R&D departments just by thinking about implementing it on a scale worth mentioning.

That's a real solid idea right there, sport.

And besides, in years of fighting Karlacks I bet nobody in the Imperium or the Sovereignty ever tried to use BFEs, Null Fields, Psychic Disruptors or other anti-psion gadgets against the Swarm before. Oh hold on, they probably did, and promptly got eaten for their trouble.

[fgalkin]

Yes, orichalcum makes the universe less permeable to psychic powers, but does not totally block them. The God-Emperor will laugh at the orichalcum ward in your pocket, although even he probably won't like a few truckloads of the stuff. To disrupt the Hive Fleet, you would need tons and tons of the stuff, as well as a missile to deliver them, penetrate the armor (so it doesn't just bounce off the Karlack's hide and drift off into space), keep it in place so it doesn't get dislodged, etc. I can see it easily costing as much as a yacht or even an ultralight.

We MIGHT try something like that if we're facing strongly psychic entities, because we can actually afford it (there's still millions of tons produced every year, but we're using most of it for our purposes, to hide from the evil gods that will eat us. Our ships have orichalcum cores and wards inscribed on the hull, for example, something that's going to bankrupt any other navy. It's scarce and expensive because we're using up the vast majority of the yearly production). Anyone else is better off building fleet-sized BFGs or something, assuming it will even work.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Akhlut]

Yes, orichalcum makes the universe less permeable to psychic powers, but does not totally block them. The God-Emperor will laugh at the orichalcum ward in your pocket, although he probably won't like a few truckloads of the stuff, either. To disrupt the Hive Fleet, you would need tons and tons of the stuff, as well as a missile to deliver them, penetrate the armor (so it doesn't just bounce off the Karlack's hide and drift off into space), keep it in place so it doesn't get dislodged, etc. I can see it easily costing as much as a yacht or even an ultralight.

We MIGHT try something like that if we're facing strongly psychic entities, because we can actually afford it (there's still millions of tons produced every year, but we're using most of it for our purposes, to hide from the evil gods that will eat us. Our ships have orichalcum cores and wards inscribed on the hull, for example, something that's going to bankrupt any other navy. It's scarce and expensive because we're using up the vast majority of the yearly production). Anyone else is better off building fleet-sized BFGs or something, assuming it will even work.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Doesn't this lead to the secondary problem of, in the case of the Karlacks, of just knocking out a single ship instead of the whole fleet? So, in essence, you just spent half your GDP to eliminate a single ship when you could have just used jargon-powered ships only costing some 5% of your GDP, tops, to take out a much larger portion of a Karlack battlefleet flying toward you.

And, CN, are you going to produce a story post that isn't simply "Faceless bureaucrat opts to increase funding for wanktastic military hardware"?

[fgalkin]

Yes, although presumably disabling the ship would affect their coordination. Personally, I'd just blow up the ship- it's only a thousand points, it can be overwhelmed and the damage to your ships is probably cheaper to repair than to run a wholly separate research program that will build a single uber missile. Less munchkinoid gimmicky wonderweapons, more dakka.

EDIT: I was thinking more of situations when facing individual uberbeings, rather than Karlack swarms. I would be interested to find out how, for example, the Leader reacts to having a ton of orichalcum dropped on her, then being shot full of orichalcum bullets. We can even retrieve and re-use them once we scrape off the gooey alien bits. Much more cost-effective, IMO.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Yes, although presumably disabling the ship would affect their coordination. Personally, I'd just blow up the ship- it's only a thousand points, it can be overwhelmed and the damage to your ships is probably cheaper to repair than to run a wholly separate research program that will build a single uber missile. Less munchkinoid gimmicky wonderweapons, more dakka.

EDIT: I was thinking more of situations when facing individual uberbeings, rather than Karlack swarms. I would be interested to find out how, for example, the Leader reacts to having a ton of orichalcum dropped on her, then being shot full of orichalcum bullets. We can even retrieve and re-use them once we scrape off the gooey alien bits. Much more cost-effective, IMO.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

The Imperium has long been studying the use of structures designed to channel psychic powers, so I would imagine a properly shaped orichalcum might have uses...

Now whether the Imperium has long discovered something similar is another matter.

[DarthShady]

Sounds like the perfect thing to put on an anti-mothership warhead against the Karlacks.

No psychic power = No Overmind

Also, I can imagine it isn't something you would want near your exotic engines and power plants, what with all of the reality bending.

No overmind means the karlack's true berserker fury is unleashed, great plan CN I expect nothing less from you. The Psychic influence of the Karlack aspects are basically the only thing stopping the Karlacks from running amock and trying to eat pretty much the entire galaxy.

And also completely destroy all cohesion and break any fleet into a disorganized mess, winning the other side a crushing victory.

Let me explain a few things about The Karlack Swarm to you. As Siege and the others have already pointed out, the Karlack psychic link is the hardest to disrupt telepathic bond in the galaxy. Your plan of disabling one Mothership to stop a whole fleet will never work for several reasons(in addition to those already mentioned). The Motherships do not directly control the Broods, they merely serve as amplifiers. And even if your magic missile succeeded in somehow hitting a Mothership magically bypassing all its defenses(Omega energy shields and weapons, living projectiles and the massive fleets of ships that escort each Mothership all the fucking time!), the only thing you would achieve would be one pissed of World Eater getting disconnected from the Hive Mind, which would then revert to its natural instinct. Feeding! And I'll let you have one guess on what kind of food Karlacks like.

Speaking of which, Karlack bio-forms, when they are cut off from the Hive Mind, behave quite differently from what you had in mind. They do not lose cohesion and break into a disorganized mess, but they revert to their natural instinct, and that is to join all their brethren and eat things! Imagine if you will a swarm of locusts or some such thing. To sum up, even if you disable a single ship in this way(Highly unlikely.) you have achieved nothing, except piss of the Aspect controlling that specific Brood. Which will promptly have the same result, and that is your guys getting eaten, infested, or worse.

Also CN, I would suggest you listen to Darkevilme's advice and get your shit together, or you may not like the consequences.

[Simon_Jester]

Also CN as an addendum: Write some thrice bedamned story posts lest I take to heart the notion I have that your entire involvement in this game is nothing more than some elaborate trolling attempt.

[modhat on]

Seconded.

The fact that you keep making commentary posts proves that you are paying enough attention to the game that you care about it. You care enough to devote the time it takes to read posts, albeit not to understand them reliably. This means that you are capable of perceiving and understanding when events have happened involving your nation.

Now, not everyone who reads the story thread posts frequently- but those who don't post ALSO have the good grace not to provoke other people and then sit around while ignoring them. If you're going to walk away from the table, you shouldn't do it when it's your turn to play.

But this is exactly what you have done, while constantly making comments on other people's gameplay.

And while you may believe your comments to be strokes of strategic genius (somehow), to the rest of us you come across like a babbling baby boy. When you sit on the sidelines and do nothing regarding events that DO concern you, while babbling about events that DO NOT concern you, you reveal yourself to be even less than a babbling baby boy. You are a babbling baby boy who has his priorities upside down.

People have done things in this game affecting your nation. Things that require a response from you. If you have any intention of playing this game, give them those responses. I don't really expect plot or characterization from you, but at least stop babbling long enough to tell us what your nation is going to do about these things that have happened.

In particular, the outstanding issues you need to address are:
-The matter of the Lost ambassador to your nation.
-The situation is regarding the orks.

I offer you two choices:

1) Play the game, and exercise creative control of your nation.
Deliver story posts telling us what you intend to do about these things. Show us how the MEH reacts to the situation it's placed itself in.

2) Refuse to play the game, and lose full creative control of your nation.
For the sake of letting other people play the game, even if you yourself don't want to play, accept a loss of full control over your nation. Other players will be able to make whatever plausible assumptions they please about your reaction, since you yourself refuse to tell anyone what your reaction is.

In case (2), "plausible assumptions" may include unfavorable assumptions that you are going to do completely foolish things. This is because you have already done and said foolish things that hurt your nation; it is not implausible that you will continue to do so. If, instead of doing foolish things, you wish for the MEH to do wise things, you must man up and DO THEM, rather than hiding and hoping everyone will go away if you don't answer your mail.

In short:
Quit babbling. Write story posts, and keep control your country. Or do not write story posts, and do not keep control of your country.

Got it?

Now, until such time as you start responding to what people do and say, others have license to make reasonable assumptions about what you're going to do. Their assumptions must be based on your actions and decisions and policy to date, and the level of intelligence and analysis you have shown in making that policy.

If that hurts you, then it's your own damn fault for being a babbling baby boy.

[Simon_Jester]

A slight clarification to everyone else:

Be sporting about this. Give Chaotic Neutral a reasonable amount of time to reply to your posts.* If he doesn't reply on account of being a babbling baby boy, after that reasonable time is up, use your own judgement about what he would do based on his past behavior and keep going.

CN is welcome, and indeed encouraged, to short-circuit this process by actually saying something about what his nation is doing instead of sitting around and jerking off on his wiki page.

*In some cases, "a reasonable amount of time" has already passed; use your own judgement.

[fgalkin]

So, probability of equipment failure on MEH ships is now approaching 100%?

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Mayabird]

*In some cases, "a reasonable amount of time" has already passed; use your own judgement.

Indeed. This ship has already sailed! And Al-Stan of the incredible sombrero and jacket is forever beyond your reach and retaliation!

[Simon_Jester]

So, probability of equipment failure on MEH ships is now approaching 100%?

On and only on the MEH ships that receive the upgrade program, equipment failures will occur at whatever awkward, thematically appropriate moments may occur.

The ships not upgraded by equipment the MEH purchased from Al-Stan, Akbah-sterd, Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Al-Jiblah, and other scrap dealers... they're still fully functional, and no more prone to unexpected catastrophe than anything else ever built by the MEH culture.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

So, probability of equipment failure on MEH ships is now approaching 100%?

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Oh Pooh. I want to have some fun.

[Simon_Jester]

Their equipment doesn't have to fail, you know. If you want to write it working, go right ahead.

[Lonestar]

EDIT: I was thinking more of situations when facing individual uberbeings, rather than Karlack swarms. I would be interested to find out how, for example, the Leader reacts to having a ton of orichalcum dropped on her, then being shot full of orichalcum bullets. We can even retrieve and re-use them once we scrape off the gooey alien bits. Much more cost-effective, IMO.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Or, for that Matter, the Amplitur Choir?

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

And now we reveal the purpose of having a rampage of Fenrisian bears, and a crazy giant gorrilla.

[Shroom Man 777]

It took us forever.