Earth In 40k Thread #4, Tempus Fugit

Mind elaborating? It sounds interesting. (or PM me or something >.>)

What.

How well do they work though/how powerful? I'd like it for the troops if possible.

Hmm, so long as it doesn't take too many of our Fabbers, I don't see a problem with this.

I'm meeting with a Rogue Trader and giving her ancient art (that we can fake very well) in trade for tech artifacts. I bought the Silvery Orb from her and the Shield. I just realized that I'm not particularly good at RPing someone that is supposed to have the diplomancer training so he is near superhumanly good at it.

As stated above, it was shiny so I bought it. After some tests I guessed it is Necron in origin (which may be wrong) and put it very far from anything important.

No idea. Fluffwise, they are like personal shields that stop a few shots before shorting out. Their advantage is that they don't fry unprotected people with energy bleed off or the like.

It's the troops that are the reason I bought one. Those things are small enough that virtually everything we field independently can have one.

Even some of the bigger missiles could mount one. Would be funny for other to realize that even our ammo has better protection than their troops.

At least warship missiles should be able to mount a few to make them more resistant to weaker PD. Like what Tyranids use.

Individual gun turrets could theoretically be fitted with one as well if we can set them up in a shield grid. That way even if something sneaks through shields, it will be stopped cold.

As I understand it, the problem is that the fabber takes a bit longer to print the shield, slowing total production. If we have a dedicated printer, it's still gonna be slow, but it can make Shields on it's entire surface area instead of having to slow down for a single component. On a large scale, it shouldn't be really noticeable as our fabbers aren't active non-stop anyway. Only in battles it would be an issue.

Ok, I want one(or several) of those, just in case. >.> I don't suppose I have them at Ilyaden? That's still going on, and despite me being far far away from any fighting, several 1 rolls might make it go differently .

*Imagines our missiles having shields and laughs*

Random Query @ Terradyne(Or any of you if you know). Can we make a planetary strategic shield, or a sufficient number of theatre shields to make even prolonged orbital bombardment impossible, or at least something that can be held back for a long time?

We can definitely make theatre shields, since that's what we're using to break sand-storms on tattoine.

As to how strong they are...as strong as our regular shields I assume(the plasma shields, as wind would go right through a void shield).

That might work once...but it'd destroy the teleporter. Note that you don't actually need a receiver for that one...

Needs to be a large yard due to its disk shape. And those don't move easily.

Reapers can't build more of themselves because they're torus-shaped. They'd end up interlocked, or with a significant structural weakness.

Urgh. I'm considering either imposing the resource penalty due to the fact it eats everything and as such picks up all the CHON. That would be at least a...70% penalty (with that much being able to be put into terraforming). The other option would be to just allow it to salvage, basically allowing only a 1-1 conversion of ships that aren't in a trillion pieces.

Kharak.

No, you can't. You can construct a theatre shield generator that would cover a few kilometres, so you can shield a city, but not a continent or a planet.

What about multiple(as in, millions) overlapping an entire surface area of a planet?

Actually, wait, I think this subject has come up before, way back when. Before the timeskip, I think.

I think you said that it was more or less impossible with Plasma Shields (without absolutely surrounding the planet with dedicated satellites, anyhow) but that it was possible if you dumped a Big McFuckHuge amount of resources into constructing a really, really big generator. I'd have to actually look through the old threads to be sure, but the amount of RU it would cost was pretty damn prohibitive as I recall anyhow (on the order of something like 500,000 RU) so it's not something we'll be building, I don't think.

By the way, I'm in no way asking we build such a large thing, just asking if it's doable.

Right, so I found the quote.

Well, I was wrong - a void-based planetary shield is impossible, a plasma shield would be if projected by a very large number of satellites, but Terradyne didn't say anything about the cost itself.

It's not actually impossible, but the necessary projector for a planetary Void Shield would be massive. And very, very expensive. And as you haven't really built a Void Shield for anything above BB class, there's no telling what sort of obstacles you'll run into along the way.

As for the Plasma shield...to get all the projectors, reactors and distribution architecture in place...about 250,000 RU.

Yeah, no, we're better off building a copy of Able (plus a few cruisers) for that amount of resources. Much better investment, methinks, at least until we get continent-sized arcologies or something.

Depends on how big a teleporter is and how badly it's damaged. If it only melts into a puddle, then it can be recycled.

I can imagine one-shot teleporters teleporting a shot towards the target, then be gobbled up by fabricators and rebuilt entirely as a replacement teleporter is slotted in. As the DAoT shuttle shows, size can be quite small.

That way we can get even more attack vectors and enemy Point Defences and defensive formations become utterly useless.

Missiles with shields?

Well guys, the rest of the galaxy has called GG already.
Chaos' collective jaws have dropped so far i think were going to need replacements.
The eldar are friendly and thus are nodding approvingly on a park bench somewhere.

non-player

What meaning has the second line?

Disbelief in such a manner ones own jaw would fall off

Figuratively

Anyway, out of boredom I have devised a way to cock block the alltime popular Chaos tactic of screwing their enemies over even if they kill all their followers before a ritual can finish.

The theory is that the 'everyone dies, ritual goes active' tactic requires psychically sensitive beings to experience strong emotions upon death so a certain actication threshold is achieved.

To counteract this, we have options.

The first stage is to identify the ritual going on. Usually, Chaos forces paint runes all over the place. Thanks to our computers and experience with runes, we should at least be able to make a rough guess as to what they are planning.

Once we know that there is something to disrupt, we can start to counteract this. For that, we need to get rid of the cultists (CSM are rarely, if ever, used as sacrifices and are too rare anyway). Sadly, killing them just like that would activate the ritual, which we don't want.

Luckily, we have those neat zombie nanites. If we dispense them with the drone swarms every killbot carries in absurd numbers, every cultist gets a dose. From there, the nanites need to knock the cultist out, slowly shut down his sensory input so he can't feed the required emotions into the warp and then kill them painlessly.

End result is a lot of dead cultists without any of them triggering the ritual as there was no blood sacrifice. Or despair. Or hope. Or extreme sensations.

Just a quiet, meaningless death.


That is the off the shelf method. The next one requires some research.

As we already know how to twist Chaos runes into non-standard functions, we may be able to expand on it to a small array that disrupts active rituals in an area. Kinda like a short circuit, or white noise generator. Then paint it all over the area and Chaos will be amusingly flummoxed as their entire plan goes up in smoke.




Something else that I noticed concerning our Warp Sensor Research is that we already have DAoT versions of them.

Navigators.

Hook them up to cybernetics and the ship AI is now able to look into the Warp.

For more detailed research, we can try to reverse engineer them and see what makes them tick. We should get computers that can process the warp as well as sensors out of it. The first is at it's easiest a Navigator version of what gives us Killbots with souls.


Thoughts?

... I'm not sure why we need to do all this complicated stuff.

Just nuke the site from orbit. If need be, do it twice. Maybe three times, if they somehow managed to summon a particularly durable Bloodthirster.

Don't we do this all the time anyway, on routine trips through the Warp...?

In case it's something really nasty that may happen or there is something we can't afford to nuke.

For trips through the warp, yes, but we apparently completely neglected their use in warp research. They are also somewhat useful in looking into the Warp from realspace. Which is damn useful if you want to look for something without going into it. Or when creating some sort of FTL sensor network.

non-player

I am now confused.

I always thought no blood was necessary (it is optional) to summon a daemon but a massive localized release of souls who were violently unbound from their bodies while experiencing a certain strong emotion (which corresponds the Chaos God whose servant daemon you are summoning), no?

Basically. My aim is to just euthanize the cultists similiar as to how a dog is put down. They don't feel anything. There isn't even any symbolism that may work as with runes. They simply keel over dead.

But shouldn't you kill each of them slowly, in sequence, rather then fast and at once..the rapid release of souls could create a breach into the warp if done rashly.

The issue with this is that there is (loosely speaking) "symbolism" involved. Nanites are analogous to micro- and nanoscale biological entities such as cells, bacteria, and the like. There is no fundamental difference.

It is perfectly possible that attempting to stop a ritual using such a method would fail if that ritual was dedicated to Nurgle.

That's still a 75% rate where it applies, but yeah, that's mostly the framework. I'm sure we can think of other ways along that general direction.

Btw, is the independant world project moving forward or has it stalled as well?

How about making them go to sleep instead of outright killing?