The forerunners are hopelessly outclassed in just about every facet and anyone who thinks that the flood could be a significant threat in the cultureverse has never read a culture book because there is just no possible way that anyone who has read a culture book and played halo or read the books and comics unless they are deluded and extrapolate to ridiculous degrees.
Well, I think to re-focus things a bit, I will post what I know about the Culture, from the books I've read (pardon me if some quotes were already brought up). And sorry, massive info-dump. I have been rather more constructively employed over the last few decades than might have been imagined. The following have been manufactured: Type One Offensive Units (roughly equivalent to Abominator class prototype): 512 Type Two Offensive Units (roughly equivalent to Torturer class): 2048 Type Three Offensive Units (roughly equivalent to Inquisitor class prototype, upgraded): 2048 Type Four Offensive Units (roughly equivalent to velocity-improved Killer class): 12288 Type Five Offensive Units (based on Thug class upgrade design study): 24576 Type Six Offensive Units (based on militarized Scree class LCU, various types): 49152 -Excession, Pg 436 *note that this isn't the entire Culture, this was a single Culture ship over the course of 40 years. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Statistics on the Culture-Idiran War: Length of war: forty-eight years, one month. Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (± .3%). Losses: ships (all classes above interplanetary) - 91,215,660 (± 200); Orbitals - 14,334; planets and major moons - 53; Rings - 1; Spheres - 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration) - 6. Historical perspective A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population. Rumours persist of far more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of time and space . . . Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy's elder civilisations rate the Idiran-Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of those singularly interesting Events they see so rarely these days. -Consider Phlebas The Mind had an image to illustrate its information capacity. It liked to imagine the contents of its memory store written out on cards; little slips of paper with tiny writing on them, big enough for a human to read. If the characters were a couple of millimetres tall and the paper about ten centimetres square and written on both sides, then ten thousand characters could be squeezed onto each card. In a metre-long drawer of such cards maybe one thousand of them - then million pieces of information - could be stored. In a small room a few metres square, with a corridor in the middle just wide enough to pull a tray out into, you could keep perhaps a thousand trays arranges in close-packed cabinets: ten billion characters in all. A square kilometre of these cramped cells might contain as many as one hundred thousand rooms; a thousand such floors would produce a building two thousand metres tall with a hundred million rooms. If you kept building those squat towers, squeezed hard up against each other until they entirely covered the surface of a largish standard-G world - maybe a billion square kilometres - you would have a planet with one trillion square kilometres of floor space, one hundred quadrillion paper-stuffed rooms, thirty light-years of corridors and a number of potential stored characters sufficiently large to boggle just about anybody's mind. In base 10 that number would be a 1 followed by twenty-seven zeroes, and even that vast figure was only a fraction of the capacity of the Mind. To match it you would need a thousand such worlds; systems of them, a clusterful of information-packed globes . . . and that vast capacity was physically contained within a space smaller than a single of those tiny rooms, inside the Mind . . . -Consider Phlebas, Pg 177 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This was the way Minds spend their time. They imagined entirely new universes with altered physical laws, and played with them, lived in them and tinkered with them, sometimes setting up the conditions for life, sometimes just letting things run so it would arise spontaneously, sometimes arranging things so that life was impossible, but other kinds and types of bizarrely fabulous complication were enabled. … The Minds had long come up with a proper name for it; they called it the Irreal, but they thought of it as Infinite Fun. That was what they really knew it as. The Land of Infinite Fun. It did the experience pathetically little justice. -Excession, Pg 139 Don't have a quote, but regular speed is around 200,000c iirc, though Culture ships can travel far, far faster in short bursts (trillions of c for microseconds). Personality storage is pretty common using neural laces, which can completely back up a person's personality so a person can effectively be 'resurrected.' The Culture can also induce supernovas in stars. As for dimension technology, hyperspace is very important to the Culture. The bulk of a Mind's components reside in hyperspace, and ships regularly reside there as well and fight battle there (and can attack from hyperspace to realspace.) They are also connected to the Grid, a dimension of near-infinite energy, which they use for propulsion among other things, and even for warfare. It sensed the oncoming fleet ahead, like a pattern of brightly rushing comets in that envisaged space, Ninety-six ships arranged in a rough circle spread across a front thirty light years of 3-D space across, half above, half below the skein. Behind them lay the traces of another wave, numerically the same size as the first but taking up twice the volume. -Excession, Pg 334 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Killing Time plunged intact through the third wave of ancient Culture ships; they rushed on, towards the Excession. It fended off a few more of the warheads and missiles which had been directed at it, turning a couple of the latter back upon their own ships for a few moments before they were detected and destructed. The hulk of the Attitude Adjuster fell astern behind the departing fleet, coasting and twisting and tumbling in hyperspace, still heading away from and outstripping the Killing Time as it braked and started to turn. There was only a vestigial fourth wave; fourteen ships (they were targeting it now). Had it known there were so few in the final echelon, the Killing Time would have attacked the second wave of ships. Oh well; luck counted too. It watched the Attitude Adjuster a moment longer to ensure it really was tearing itself apart. It was. It turned its attention to the remaining fourteen craft. On its suicide trajectory it could take them all on and stand a decent chance of destroying perhaps four of them before its luck ran out; maybe a half-dozen if it was really lucky. Or it could push away and complete its brake-turn-accelerate manoeuvre to make a second pass at the main fleet. Even if they'd be waiting for it this time, it could reckon on accounting for a good few of them. Again, in the four-to-eight range. Or it could do this. It pulled itself round the edge of the fourteen ships in the rump of the fleet as they reconfigured their formation to meet it. Bringing up the rear they had had more warning of its attack and so had had time to adopt a suitable pattern. The Killing Time ignored the obvious challenge and temptation of flying straight into their midst and flew past and round, targeting only the outer five craft nearest it. They gave a decent account of themselves but it prevailed, dispatching two of them with engine field implosures. This was, it had always thought, a clean, decent and honourable way to die. The pair of wreckage-shells coasted onwards; the rest of the ships sped on unharmed, chasing the main fleet. Not one of the ships turned back to take it on. The Killing Time continued to brake, oriented towards the fast vanishing war fleet and the region of the Excession. Its engine fields were gouging great livid tracks in the energy grid as it back-pedalled furiously. It encountered the ROU which had dropped aft with engine damage, falling back towards it as the Killing Time slowed and the other craft coasted onward and struggled to repair its motive power units. The Killing Time attempted to communicate with the ROU, was fired upon, and tried to take the craft over with its effector. The ROU's own independent automatics detected the ship's Mind starting to give in. They tripped a destruct sequence and another hypersphere of radiation blossomed beneath the skein. Shit, thought the Killing Time. It scanned the hyper volumes around itself. Nothing threatening. Well, damn me, it thought, as it slowed. I'm still alive. This was the one outcome it hadn't anticipated. It ran a systems check. Totally unharmed, apart from the self-inflicted degradation to its engines. It slackened off the power, dropping back to normal maxima and watching the readouts; significant degradation from here in about a hundred hours. Not too bad. Self-repairing would take days at all-engines-stop. Warhead stocks down to forty per cent; remanufacturing from first principles would take four to seven hours, depending on the exact mix it chose. Plasma chambers at ninety-six per cent efficiency; about right for the engagement system-use profile according to the relevant charts and graphs. Self-repair mechanisms champing the bit. It looked around, concentrating on the view astern. No obvious threats; it let the self-repairers make a start on two of the four chambers. Full reconstruction time, two hundred and four seconds. Entire engagement duration; eleven microseconds. Hmm; it had felt longer. But then that was only natural. -Excession Pg 396 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gridfire struck the Orbital. Horza paused and watched the screen as it lit up suddenly, flashing once over its whole surface until the sensors coped with the sudden increase in brilliance and compensated. For some reason Horza had thought the Culture would just splash the gridfire all over the massive Orbital and then spatter the remains with CAM, but they didn't do that; instead a single narrow line of blinding white light appeared right across the breadth of the day side of the Orbital, a thin fiery blade of silent destruction which was instantly surrounded by the duller but still perfectly white cover of clouds. That line of light was part of the grid itself, the fabric of pure energy which lay underneath the entire universe, separating this one from the slightly younger, slightly smaller antimatter universe beneath. The Culture, like the Idirans, could now partially control that awesome power, at least sufficiently to use it for the purposes of destruction. A line of that energy, plucked from nowhere and sliced across the face of the three-dimensional universe, was down there: on and inside the Orbital, boiling the Circlesea, melting the two thousand kilometres of transparent wall, annihilating the base material itself, straight across its thirty-five-thousand-kilometre breadth. Vavatch, that fourteen million kilometre hoop, was starting to uncoil. A chain, it had been cut. There was nothing left now to hold it together; its own spin, the source of both its day-night cycle and its artificial gravity, was now the very force tearing it all apart. At about one hundred and thirty kilometres per second, Vavatch was throwing itself into outer space, unwinding like a released spring. The livid line of fire appeared again, and again, and again, working its way methodically round the Orbital from where the original burst had struck, neatly parcelling the entire Orbital into squares, thirty-five thousand kilometres to a side, each containing a sandwich of trillions upon trillions of tonnes of ultradense base material, water, land and air. Vavatch was turning white. First the gridfire seared the water into a border of clouds; then the outrushing air, spilling from each immense flat square like heavy fumes off a table, turned its load of water vapour to ice. The ocean itself, no longer held by the spin force, was shifting, spilling with infinite slowness over one edge of every plate of ruptured base material, becoming ice and swirling away into space. The precise, brilliant line of fire marched on, going back in reverse-spin direction, neatly dissecting the still curved, still spinning sections of the Orbital with its sudden, lethal flashes of light — light from outside the normal fabric of reality. Horza remembered what Jandraligeli had called it, back when Lenipobra had been enthusing about the destruction. 'The weaponry of the end of the universe,' the Mondlidician had said. Horza watched the screen and knew what the man had meant. ... The relentless line of fire completed its circuit of the Orbital, back almost to where it had started. The Orbital was now a rosette of white flat squares backing slowly away from each other towards the stars: four hundred separate slabs of quickly freezing water, silt, land and base material, angling out above or underneath the plane of the system's planets like flat square worlds themselves. ... Just as Horza thought that the Culture would be content with that, the screen lit up once more. Everyone of those flat cards, and the Hub, of the exploded Orbital blazed once with an icy, sparkling brilliance as though a million tiny white stars were shining through each shattered piece. The light faded, and those four hundred expanses of flat worlds with their centre Hub were gone, replaced by a grid of diced shapes, each exploding away from the others as well as from the rest of the disintegrating Orbital. Those pieces flashed, too, bursting slowly with a billion pinpricks of light which, when they faded, left debris almost too small to make out. Vavatch was now a swollen and spiralled disc of flashing, glittering splinters, expanding very slowly against the distant stars like a ring of bright dust. The glinting, sparkling centre made it look like some huge, lidless and unblinking eye. The screen flashed one final time. No single points of light could be made out this time. It was as though the whole now vague but bloated image of the shattered circular world glowed with some internal heat, making a torus-shaped cloud out of it, a halo of white light with a fading iris at its centre. Then the show was over, and only the sun lit up the slowly blooming nimbus of the annihilated world. [Collapsed Antimatter used] -Consider Phlebas ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself to not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometres away. That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off . . . and still have no good idea why you were fighting. -Consider Phlebas, Pg 33 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Suppose we make ourselves known to this ghastly rabble; what happens?' Li stretched his arms out, and looked round us all just long enough to get a few people starting to answer him back, then roared on; 'I'll tell you what! They won't believe us! Oh, so we have moving maps of the galaxy accurate to a millimetre contained in something the size of a sugar cube, oh so we can make Orbitals and Rings and get across the galaxy in a year and make bombs too small to see that could tear their planet apart… -The State of the Art ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Grey Area was Fascinated and Appalled. It had never thought to experience anything like this. It had grown up in a universe almost totally free from threat; providing you didn’t try to do anything utterly stupid like plunge into a black or a white hole, there was simply no natural force that could threaten a ship of its power and sophistication; even a supernova held little threat, handled properly. -Excession, Pg 418
Funnily enough the novel even references the Flood scaling their assaults based on the "difficulty" level of each civilization. Early humanity for example faced an uncoordinated, but rather virulent cannibalistic mutation that was only stymied when the humans took drastic measures in fighting the Flood and demonstrated their worth to the Mantle (it's postulated that the Flood only respond to extreme - albeit creative solutions). The Forerunners on the other hand, in the very next cycle, were going up against a hyper-dimensional gestalt intelligence that could manipulate machine intelligence from afar, not talk it off the ledge as some incorrectly postulated, but literally change the core programming in a manner that stifled the Forerunners. They were fighting an entity that wasn't even corporeal in the classical sense, and it wasn't until the Forerunners practiced their own extreme - but similarly creative hail Mary did the Flood cease the war. Being tools and direct descendants of the Precursors it would make sense that they can adjust their assaults in correspondence with the foes they face, after all they're here to examine life, not just outright destroy it.
Ahh nice its the classic "variable yield argument" except done not just for an individual weapon but for a whole civilisation.
Please note that every single Culture Mind is/can do all of this, in quite a bit less than the 43 years it apparently took for Mendicant Bias to be turned, and have multiple levels of defenses designed to prevent external forces from doing likewise to them (including backup brains that are designed to detect if the primary brains have been irreversibly subverted). And there are a lot of Minds. What you and others have said about the Flood indicates that it might be a recurring problem for the Culture, but by no means would it be a difficult one.
We don't know their limits since we only have a handful of instances to go by (ranging from an uncoordinated parasite that mere humans could fight off to "Oh shit! Where did our AI magically vanish to?!" in a matter of years), but it's facile to compare their capabilities to a "variable yield" argument when their entire modus operandi (creations of a civilization who were gods from the perspective of the Forerunners) dictates that they experiment rather than mindlessly consume. Again, people who haven't read the full range of material see Zombies (instantly infectious, thermodynamically impossible, psychic, hyper-dimensional Zombies unaffected by time and the constraints of normal biology), unfortunately Primordium pretty much stripped away that contention by revealing the origin and the true purpose of the Gravemind. That's good, unfortunately it doesn't actually address the contention at hand. The intrusion was logged at less than a second actually. It took 43 years to acquire the resources needed to move on the Capital in force, but it's clear that Gravemind is nothing but a sweet-talker. Whoosh. One of these days I'm going to encounter someone with a degree of reading comprehension, and it's going to blow my head clean off.
So, what would happen if a Mind decided to effectorize the Gravemind/Primordial? (And again, the Culture vs. the Forerunners themselves).
As far as i can tell, it really really didnt. All that you said over the course of the thread shows that the precursor/gravemind is really smart, very hard to destroy and can possibly affect some AIs with massive effort. Even then the amount of physical interaction the gravemind/precursor can do without having a flood body/army seems extremely limited. More importantly it says absolutely nothing about the flood itself, which remains a peculiar and logically not all that threatening organic species. How does the existence of the primordial, gravemind or his skills or plans affect the flood apparent instant infection, thermodynamic impossibility or unrealistic biology properties? While you're at it, you could also explain how the flood could remain a threat when every last specimen has, potentially, all of its atoms annihilated? Its not like the gravemind can will more flood into existence, and even if he did, the physical creatures would just be killed again.
Yeah, not seeing it, the Culture has species like the Flood, I'm sure there is something with exactly the same stated purpose and methodology, and they don't have a vast civilization wide imperative to fight them. They have an agency which deals with it. How did the Daleks put it? "THIS IS NOT WAR. THIS IS PEST CONTROL!"
The Flood are a godlike out of context problem* which is incapable of being interacted with, only responds by utterly ignoring everything or no-selling anything tried on it, appeared from another universe, and left just as mysteriously? *For a civilization which itself is an out of context problem for most anything shy of say, the Xeelee or Timelords. The Culture isn't quite Type 4, but the only reason they wouldn't count as Type 3 is by choice, as stated several times in the stories. Highest Forerunner feats I've seen are still Type 2 on the scale, dyson swarms and moving stars isn't the same as restructuring the entire universe or tossing galaxies around.
You are basically treated the Flood as some sort of pest, not as a biological superweapon developed by a race that used space-time as building blocks. EDIT: And no one knows where the Flood consciousness is stored. Because it sure as hell isn't the Flood, and it sure as hell isn't the Gravemind.
That was my point. Nothing concerning the precursor changes anything demonstrated by the flood, they're still mostly magical space zombies. The flood are a bunch of organic organisms with some reasonably impressive infection capabilities that can be fought with essentially real life weapons and were said to be easily defeatable by the forerunners if not for MBs betrayal, while the Excession is a supertech ship that can travel between universes, teleport ship in less than planck unit of time and generally makes a civilization, that is already more capable than forunners, look like children. Yea, you have no idea what you're talking about do you.
not gonna argue with you about flood... rama has already explained why your wrong. is the culture capable of any sort of time-manipulation... (Im looking and i can't any examples...) if they aren't the forerunners, Age the Culture ships, minds, and organics until entropy destroys them.
Culture has no mean of time-manipulation, it impossible for culture to have it as it not allow in culture verse. At least I believe they have no time travel.
Well Then thats one absurdly powerful piece of technology that the forerunners do better than the culture.
We have absolutely no idea of the extent of the Forerunner's time manipulation, and as if yet there is absolutely no evidence that it is used in ship-to-ship combat. I find your claim of aging the Culture's ships rather far-fetched given the Culture's far, far superior range, firepower, and reaction time.
Sorry but if Forerunner can use their own time tech on their own ship they could have far better reaction time than Culture ships.
We know the Forerunners mastered Slipspace meaning they had to perfect to navigate Slipspace with all of its time distortion issues. They had the Crystal from Reach that was only a fragment of the crystal that powered their FTL engines, that thing that killed the Primordial, and I think during Charum Hakkor the Forerunners bent space-time to fire weapons from elsewhere or some time else. Can't remember that last one. It was in the scene where the human admiral was recounting the Forerunner's advance.
You're not going to find any examples of time manipulation in the Culture because time manipulation is impossible. This is a Word of God statement, rather than the Culture simply thinking its impossible or not having figured out how to do it yet. Space manipulation is pretty limited to causing gridfire incursions, since that involves causing twisting the edge of the 4th dimension to intersect with the 3rd. Creating pocket universes or making things bigger on the inside style spacial manipulations isn't one of their abilities. Their matter and energy manipulation is certainly quite good, and so they should have little trouble dealing with whatever Flood forces appear, even if they can't strike at the Flood directly because its hiding in a pocket universe somewhere (though if that's the case, they'll certainly start devoting research into how to pull that little trick off).
Biological superweapons and space-time manipulation aren't very impressive in the Cultureverse, you ever heard of the Affront?
Did the Affront create a pocket universe? Seeing as how the Culture can't, I'm gonna go with a resounding "no".
