Your away team lands amidship the /Carolina Days/ , a modular freighter that now houses ten thousand-ish souls. Thirty individuals wearing partially or completely robotic sleeves, armored to hell and back, and loaded with everything you can think of but antitank gear. Originally, all you were here to do is you're here to do is extract people who'd volunteered to join your collective, who had skills you needed, and who could get gear that you wanted - provided you were willing to give them a ride out.

[[Signals are all over the place. Hard to orient anything - hold on, sealing at the airlock.]] The pilot coms on the tacnet. The airlock was for the benefit of the current inhabitants - none of the away team needed to breathe.

The airlock opens with a hiss, a small cramped compartment just big enough to fit for figures in microgravity. The lead team - Teng, Juno, Chang, Akaro - cycles through the airlock, weapons readied. So far, so good - all it takes for the team's lead negotiator to purchase unimpeded passage through the most cramped and desperate sections of the ship is a few packages of mass-fabbed rations.

( http://pastebin.com/Ut9WAfsA )

Progress continues unabated - despite setbacks from the Sinaloa cartel, intensive training in the weeks leading up to the raid ( http://pastebin.com/AyThqQyT ) and access to fabbed replicas of Brazilian military gear continue to make the cartel's harassing attacks ineffective. Most give up quickly - few of the minor gangs or cartel affiliates feel like fighting too hard with synthetic soldiers pointing guns in their face.

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The training makes a difference, but so, too, do the soldiers. Eight of the twenty soldiers are from the /Horn of Plenty/ - they're young, tough-minded, willing to both play dirty and follow instructions. The rumors about their shady background seem justified, but for your purposes, now, irrelevant.

Your forces split, to protect their existing packages and to grab the last but most important package - several packages of medichine seeds and the control software necessary to make use of them. This might be the point at which the Sinaloas step it up, grow a pair, or bring in some hired guns.

This is a scenario that was foreseen, and it's exactly for this sort of scenario you have overload grenades; filling the dingy, tiny drug lab with bouncing rubber fragments, noxious gases, and ear-splitting sounds. It's executed to the number, the package and the evacuee are seized by Teng and Akaro, their retreat covered by smoke and particle beam fire. The cartel's synthetic killers are held back long enough for the rest of the team to beat a hasty retreat from the frontlines, only to discover that the frontlines had moved elsewhere.

[[What do you mean, they've disappeared?]] The translation interface was set to produce dispassionate summaries, but it was hard to mistake the anger and annoying in the pilot's tone.

[[I mean they split off from the group as soon as we were in sight of the sled! Seven of them - all from the /Horn of Plenty/ - suddenly switched targets, went after something else!]] The lead negotiator, Dr.Kingston frantically messaged the Phoenix and the Horn to figure out what was going on. [[I don't know where they are.]]

[[If I had to guess,]] one of the infoware specialists interjected, [[I'd say you should follow the gunfire.]]

The /Carolina Days/ doesn't have what you'd call good mesh access. Just the opposite, in fact, making pulling spime images impossible. But you can sometimes track things by the panic of the inhabitants, and some of them upload images to the mesh that can be sniffed out. Your information specialists capture one - and there's your strike team, carrying several large packages and exchanging fire with several enforcers with triad tattoos, including an impossibly fast woman who you are almost certain is a Fury.

All of sudden they're back on the tactical network, requesting support, because whoever they fucked with, they miscalculated. One synth is down, and so is one of their pods. The other team as to direct, expose themselves to cartel fire to swoop in and save the day. They're just in time to provide some relief fire for the renegade operatives, just in time to grab the stacks of the now-three unfortunate individuals, and withdraw before things get any worse. In the confusion, they lose one of two briefcases they're hauling.

[[What the hell did you *do*?]] Kingston asks the ringleader, once they're safetly back on the shuttle. The vacuum pod, sweating as much as a pod can sweat and flush with victory, opens the backpack. [[It's a darkcasting rig. Ego bridge, comms equipment. Psychosurgery gear. And - about four thousand souls that they've captured. Well, two now. We...heard that this group was in business, that they weren't expecting trouble. It seemed too good an opportunity to pass up.]] The ringleader shrugs, unapologetically - but of course he's lying, at least some - this wasn't a small group of rogues, other individuals had to have been involved in planning this divergence.

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>Discussion/Decision Time, /tg/
You've made some enemies, impressed a lot of people who might be friends, and driven a few serious wedges in your alliances. How are you going to resolve this sort of issue? What are you going to do about the 'package'?

Progress on the other fronts: you've begun constructing armaments for the 'Persistence of Vision' and 'Horn of Plenty'. You've also opened a somewhat more successful dialog with the UNS Bohr, which is now much more willing to consider your proposals - but you'll do much better if you can convince more ships that you're worth following. You've picked up some of the low-hanging fruit by offering to fix their stuff. How do you plan to

It's getting close to the point where you are considering being able to launch for the Belt - but of course, 'the Belt' is a big place. Are you aiming for the Martian or Jovians Trojans? The main belt, anywhere within range on a convenient orbit? What physical characteristics and neighborhood are you aiming for? What about a stopover along the way - for example, at Mars, or Qing Long?

Finally, the journey itself will take a while from four to ten months, depending on your exact plans. How do you plan to spend that time? Is there anything special you plan to do while you're on the long arc to nowhere?

(I'm fucking tired now and will return in a number of hours, probably about nine of them. Good luck, /tg/ ?)

Also fuck I switched tense, like, three times in there.

>>38145075
The package is a security risk until we have built a facility to handle it. The kind of facility that uses low infection spread data communication techniques like interpretive dance, mime, semaphore, allegorical oil painting, etc.

Which means a black box with alpha forks and face paint, and alpha forks who are willing to risk eternal torture.

There are people in that hell that need liberating, but we don't know what infection they have. Which means we need to detain, interrogate, and permanently erase the triads involved if we want a measure of security. Which means someone is going to have to work on their "advanced interrogation" techniques. Somefork who is probably willing to kill themselves when they're done so they don't have to live with it.

4000, even if they prove uninfected, requires a processing facility. It is exactly the same problem as Carolina Days, now in a portable package.

And we failed thousands of the self-deluding on Carolina Days. If we can't incorporate people into our community, and if they are not abhorrent enough to permanently delete, then what do we do with unwanted refugees?

What do we do with the boat people?

>>38145075
Okay first, we need more info on these guys. If they had told us their goals before, we'd have probably agreed. This is a major breech of trust.

>>38145368
Initiative and begging forgiveness is fine. Saving 4000 people is wonderful. What has been problematic is their insular decision to allocate resources without discussion, resources that have potentially left two forks in eternally computed hell. Those forks should have been able to make an informed decision in particular, and the community should have been given the opportunity to back their initiative since it wasn't a "hot pursuit" decision on the spot.

As with all political problems in a labouring democracy, this will require discussion, honesty and consensus building.

>>38145075
First things first. We have our goals, all of them, and the cost of two morphs is incredibly low given the circumstances.

Now... We have gear we desperately needed. Can somebody give me a full list of WHAT exactly was saved? What did we just get in addition to 30 morphs, medichine seeds, a medical fabber (I think?), and 100 willing info morphs.

We have 2000 spare morphs, who I say we don't undos until we reach the main belt and can set up a containment zone we can remotely detonate, from another asteroid.

The psycho surgery gear is enormously helpful -if- we can get the people to use it.

I also say we need to hold a vote on punishment. I think those who went on the renegade expedition should give up their morphs for the time being and be moved to the back of the line for new morphs. When their turn comes up, they get their original morphs back. But I think a vote needs to be held and a trial set up with surface thought and emotion access ton the defendants and from the impartial judge (perhaps the imam? Or we bring in one of the un people willing to act in such a capacity?)

I say we aim for the main belt. We shoot for a place with ice mining and heavier elements. Metallic and carbonaceous asteroids are common as dirt, but ice bearing and heavier element asteroids are much more valuable. I'm talking things like uranium and such.

I don't know if we should stop off anywhere.

To get more people, we use our op publicity if fucking with nasty criminals as a reason we can protect people, and we join up in a temp alliance with the Bohr to help them in processing and repairing the shops that come to them. We can copy the medichines and pirate their programming to replicate them and do enormously potent work in helping the bohr do more than just repair and refuel other refugees. Eventually they'll realize they have to go or be snapped up in a power grab.

>>38144901
In this moment we are euphoric. Not because of some phony Promethean's blessing, but because we value enlightenment

>>38145564
Agreed. Total honest in this situation. What they wanted to do? Laudable. They should have to,d us. That gear will help us enormously, and the info morphs are on ice until we can go through them, so resources there are good. If they had told us, we could have insured we got out with all 4000, not just half.

Trust. We must have it. Between all of us. Without it, we will fall apart.

Given the circumstances, forget removing their morph status, but they have to work to help those who were hurt rescuing them.

>>38145323
I don't think we have the simulspace capability to run 4,000 egos. We have two options here: one, just leave the box inert until we have the time, energy, and money to deal with it effectively ourselves, and two, we dump the problem on some charitable soul who has more equipment than we do. If Titan has started their One Mind, One Body program already they would be ideal.

Actually, come to think of it, if they're all willing to be sleeved in synthmorphs, we might be able to start sleeving them pretty quickly. Even if we can't integrate them, we could sleeve them, give them skillsofts, and dump them on the LLA. They'd be in a better position than the average case indenture, at least.

As to the rogue team, it's time to fucking grill them. We might even have to kick the Horn of Plenty out if their answers don't satisfy, although obviously this would be an extreme measure.

...contemplate launching a second raid to retrieve that second briefcase. Contemplate the fact that we may have just become entangled in a crusade.

3Jane was branching out, there was room to move, room to breathe, room for more than just fucking.

She'd kind of quit the fucking. She now also got fucked. It had started slowly. First she fucked when she wasn't allocated socially useful jobs. Then one day people voted that she fuck socially usefully some of her time. That was when the problems began. It wasn't just for her any more, it couldn't be.

People came to 3Jane with problems that couldn't just be solved by banging her penis into them. She'd ditched that penis, and the body attached to it, it was really about a time when she wasn't fully herself—yet. Now she was 3Jane who fucked and got fucked, when she wasn't doing something the friends who worked needed. And that meant she needed to tailor the fucks to the people who needed fuckery. And that meant, more and more, that she fell back on ideas she'd read through books.

It was harder being 3Jane than the woman she'd been before. Before that woman had her books and thoughts. Now 3Jane kept people together, or put them back together, through their needs. And their needs could be terrifying work. And mostly their needs involved talking and holding.

It was getting to the point where any manual labour other than being 3Jane was going to be the respite from the socially important jobs we all needed from her. If her thesis advisor knew, he'd blush. She hoped he wasn't alive anymore. That University fell with its city, being dead was the best alternative for him.

>>38145670
We keep them on ice until we can deal with the problem ourselves. And kicking out the hunt of length after investing so much into them is obviously out if the question. But grilling them is definitely up. Full honesty session. Everyone participates with surface thoughts and surface emotions readable by all. We learn what is going on.

>>38145712
>hunt of length
Phone?

>>38145670
They'll be ready for it thus time. They'll probably launch themselves out now. The trail will likely have gone cold. We save who we can. If we ever see an opportunity to save more people though? We take it. Human and ego trafficking is the worst crime. The theft of a being's ability to self determinate is worse than evil. It is a tumor. Any time we encounter these fucks, we scorch them and burn out their stacks.

>>38145323
>>38145368
>What do we do with the boat people?
>This is a major breech of trust.
This is true, but, well. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to investigate? Throw individuals out? What if that threatens to break up the alliance before it really gets going? What if some of your own people are complicit?

>>38145368
>Okay first, we need more info on these guys
>These people are much more dedicated autonomists - closer to anarchists, in fact - who don't want to head for corporate society. You get the feeling that at least half of the hundred or so members have a problem with the law. They were considering trying to head to the Martian outback. They're a mix, mostly from south-east Asia.
They probably got up via the Pacific Beanstalk, before it went down, just the vaguely lucky who managed to make it to the oceanic base station ahead of the killbots. They made it because they were politically active and against the corp bullshit before the Fall, and were already in better shape than their average citizen to handle the stresses of the Fall - in other words, mostly some degree of criminal.

Also, I should note that a roll will be necessary to do any kind of democratic punishment. For some, they're heroes, and mob justice is fickle and sometimes easily swayed.

>>38145711
>pls.

sleep is for the weak

>>38145774
I'm actually more interested in their reasons. Let's hear why they did what they did, and why they felt we wouldn't help them out? Then we decide if punishment is necessary.

Their intentions are what matter to determine if they are heroes or not.

>>38145711
I actually like thus much more than the previous one. Good job.

>>38145774
At the moment, the main priority is getting them to tell us how they knew where the cartel was operating. They're not just former criminals, they're clearly still plugged into those networks in some fashion. We also need to know more about our new enemy. What resources are they likely to bring to bear?

As for the infugees, we should probably get their input when deciding what to do with them. If we're lucky, some of them will have families or friends we can track down and hand them off to.

>>38145852
We can't de-ice them until we can set up a secure server. which will have to wait for the belt.

Right now, while deciding this, we should finish refits on the vision, and burn for the Bohrs, offering our assistance. Also pull out from the ten star for the time being, leave behind a claim beacon on it.

>>38145870
I don't think creating a secure server is that hard. All we have to do is take an existing server and airgap it and bam! secure server. Takes about thirty seconds.

>>38145030
>darkcasting rig. Ego bridge, comms equipment. Psychosurgery gear

Can somebody tell us what this all is exactly?

>>38145890
It's equipment for secretly moving egos around and also torturing them.

>>38145886
This is the exsurgent virus newbie. It is a memetic and information based virus. All information, visual patterns, computer code, genetic code, taste, touch, smell, sound. They are -all- vectors for turning you into a TITAN zombie, or worse.

>>38145075
>You've made some enemies

Yeah, no shit, sounds like we fucking pissed in Nine Lives cheerios. That will NOT be a fun engagement for us.

>How do you plan to

Hanging question OP?

>It's getting close to the point where you are considering being able to launch for the Belt - but of course

I say we shoot for the main belt. 10 Hygeia or that family of C-type asteroids. We could pick an M-type, but I think production of a Cole bubble might be a bit beyond our resources. That's a "Phase 2" plan, or "Phase 3" depending on how you look at it.

We could punch out to the Jovian Trojans and be closer to the growing heart of Anarchism and the AA, but I feel like our linked culture best works in the Belt.

A stop-over at Qing Long might be interesting. Lot of laborers and now refugees being sleeved there. But it's run by the Triads. On the other hand, it's run by the Triads as their base for their Red Market Fab operation.

>How do you plan to spend that time? Is there anything special you plan to do while you're on the long arc to nowhere?

Education. Fabrication. Communication. Diversification.

We should move from raw production capacity and basic essentials to strengthen our computer network, produce additional bodies (more synths and if we can swing it get started on Pod fab). We build the start of a mesh, and get started on mining equipment. We start having some of our unskilled labor pick up more specialized skills, so they can begin directing bots rather than doing all the work personally.

>>38145890

Darkcasting is covert long range communication. You can send data long range without having it logged by the local traffic control or whatever. Ego Bridge is the technology vital to resleeving.

>>38145914
We're dealing with 9Lives here, not TITANs.
And yes, it is possible to be too paranoid. Exhibit one: the Jovians.

>>38145924
Well we needed those anyway. And the psychosurgery gear will help mental damaged folks get better.

Also yeah, I like your game plan. I say we supplement it by partnering with the Bohr and convincing them of our good intentions by helping them out until they have to leave. We can use that time to barter upgrading other ships with new gear in return for samples of tech for us to copy and make blue prints of, as well as straight up blue prints.

>>38145949
We have no idea where they got those egos from. Stolen from the last launches from earth? Stolen from other refugees rather than infugees? There's a crater of radioactive slag where a lunar city used to be as a testament to what happens if you're not careful. If we had gotten these while nearer to Mars than earth I'd agree with you, but this us earth orbit and those egos are probably from the last days of the fall.

>>38145818
>>38145774
>>38145567
>punishment

Sounds like it's time to test our legal system.

We'll hold a trial, if we can assemble an impartial Jury. They present evidence one way, the Collective's representative another, Judge and Jury decide if they did wrong by our limited code of law.

Though our sentence should be fairly mild, they took most of the immediate risk onto themselves. A couple months of reduced free time/increase work shifts.

And in a non-public fora, whoever constitutes our security or self-defense work-group can ask them to kindly explain themselves.

Rolled 34 (1d100)

>>38145997
Sounds good. Let's roll for it.

I agree that the sentence shouldn't be too harsh since they mostly endangered themselves and only when the primary objective was completed. If they should be punished at all...

>>38145994
Point. I concede.

Juries adjudicate guilt for punishment.

We should heal the wounds and prevent re-occurrence.

Publish inquest under a coroner meant to result in findings that prevent future preventable deaths is better than a jury. Combined with healing talking sessions in the Truth Commission mode.

We heal, we don't punish.

>>38146040
This. A thousand times this.

>>38146020
Veto (for 4 hours), lack of adequate formative discussion.

>>38146040
Especially since these guys -only- did this when they were sure the main mission was complete, and tried to make sure things couldn't be traced back to us by disconnecting their textural network from the primary group.

>>38146068
You're arguing they tried to mitigate damage to the collective? We also know they're 'criminals' in the sense that they opposed the original powers that be, which were facists... So I can't really fault them.

Thus was a worthy cause. I just wish they had asked us for help so we could have saved more of the infugees.

>>38146100
Not to mention we could have made a dedicated effort to exterminate the group which has almost certainly gone to ground now. Sadly this will likely be traced back to us now. It makes arming our three vessels critical now.

>>38146040
>>38146100

The issue is more that they, on their own initiative, without consulting the collective, have placed a great burden on the collective in the form of a lockbox filled with 2000 egos and the ire of some people with enough cash to build a forknapping rig. It's not about the deaths of the three members, though we can question them to see if they understood the risks they were under, this is about potential harm to the collective and if we should take steps to discourage this behavior, if the consensus even finds such a thing worth bothering over.

>>38146164

> to exterminate the group which has almost certainly gone to ground now

Comrade, there's only one outfit crazy enough to into soul trading in this system, and they don't do competition. Eliminating 9 Lives is like trying to remove the Mafia or the Triads.

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Alright OP, question.

We can build vehicle size weapons
We can build small rocket propulsion vehicles
We have a lot of spare informorphs.

Can we build some Space Fighters and hangar them in the Horn?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2147404/Found-The-single-asteroid-thats-worth-60-billion-years-financial-output-entire-WORLD.html

We should find an asteroid like this one. With hydrocarbons on it. Hydrocarbons will be rediculousky important for our purposes.

>>38146237

I've been saying to shoot for a C-type asteroid all along.

>>38146227
This would be awesome if we could do it...

>>38146256
Sorry, misunderstood what the designation meant.

>>38146227
Why not mount them on the outside of the ship with drones and through the hull systems allowing refueling and rearming?

>>38146351

Parasite fighters never really worked in atmo IIRC, but they might work in vacuum. We just have to worry about them getting exploded or needing repairs while outside.

>>38146263

Theoretically possible. Fighters in EP use omnidirectional laser and railgun pods in a ring and are generally crewed by a single AI or Infomorph (though you can use a vacuum rated morph if you want). They also have missile tubes.

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The skillsoft was running white phosphorus-hot and hummingbird-heart fast, raging and pacing in the confines of her skull-cage, driven by simulated adrenaline and virtualized war drugs. Her front was coated in arterial spray, a Sinaloa who had come at her with a knife. A fine knife, the skillsoft had whispered. Monomolecular, self-sharpening, well balanced, folded up into the hilt for safe carrying. She had agreed, and taken it after her gun had unzipped his torso. (Stack recoverable. Probably.)

Not much of a challenge, the skillsoft whispered, disappointed. Teng hesitated to agree; she was scared of how quickly she had become acclimatized to the bone-chip mulch voice sitting on top of her brainstem, not quite fore, not quite hind.
[Breach in 3.]
No more introspection. Subliminal gear-check, flechette gun traded out for an assault rifle.
[2.]
Mates in position. Behind her, the heavy hitter, smoothbore anti-material rifle with a dozen types of ammunition.
[1.]
In front, the grenadiers.
[Breach.]
Charges fire, door disintegrating into shrapnel and spalling, and a dozen overloads following. Light, sound, pain. Senses dialed down, Teng charges in, gun up. Targets- synthmorphs, armed, reeling. She fires, seeking out gaps in the armor, heavy solid bullets punching through joints and seams. Move fast, the skillsoft shrieks, keep moving, keep shooting, to pause is death and- worse- mission failure. Teng doesn't have to be told twice. A target is hit, doesn't go down- then it does, smoothbore punching through its armor, smart round delivering its carbon-fiber payload. Conductive. Mostly harmless to biologicals, but like neurotoxin to electronics.

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>>38146522
They're startting to rally-
[Down and blank]
Teng shuts down her sensorium just in time to let another barrage of overloads washover her. Boot back up. Rounds are spanging off her armor- a couple have made it through, nothing vital, feeling pain is entirely selective. The smoothbore is punched off his feet by kinetic weight of incoming, but gets back up. There's one right on top of her- a dozen possible options but she goes for the knife instead, flicking it out of its handle and smashing it through the optics. Fire sweeps in from the side- Teng freezes to avoid stepping into the line of fire by accident-

Then, the fight is over, adrenaline fades, and the skillsoft once more becomes a heavy lumpen alien thing squatting on top of her brainstem. No more the flashing fever-tiger. There is a half-hearted counter-attack while extracting the fabbers and seeds, but the feeling of gore-fed symbiosis is gone.

When the Horn of Plenty team calls in- rogue agents, heavy firepower, disciplined and competent enemies, a training scenario come true, the adrenaline and bloody-handed feral glee surging back, it is nearly a relief.

I think we need to set up an elite team of soldiers. Trust units. We follow the Qin Dynasty model of 5 man teams. 4 soldiers and a leader.

trust Units network surface level thoughts, senses, and tactical information while in the field. They work as a single organism. The leader of the squad is leader by being the focus of the network. They make decisions based on all the information when there is conflicts of info. In larger operations, leaders sync with each other, coordinating through a higher level leader, who I. Turn link through a higher level. A hierarchical collectivist army, working as a single entity with a thousand eyes.

What do you guys think? Possible? Or would it drive the leader egos mad?

so long term goals people? We going to try to system conquest and uniting humanity? If so? How? Obviously the hypercoros gotta go. I'd argue any violent faction that refuses to coexist with other philosophy's has to go too (predatory exhumans).

What about extropians?

How do we deal with other orgs? Do we just say 'you're now part of the collective. We have a very few universal laws. Everything else is determined on a habitat level, you send a representative to your cluster's collective council, who in turn send one to the system level council.'

Frankly, I think we focus on taking over the belt, replace the extropians and anarchy-capitalists. Then, with all of those resources, Assuming we can do so without breaking up the AA, We go after the Junta. If we can nail the Junta with that much power and resources... We can close off the inner system entirely... Begin to consolidate the outer syste m of hypercorp interests... And begin to tighten the noose.

>>38146770
Personally think we should remove the extropians entirely... None of the other anarchist factions like them overly much, and we can almost certainly nail their asses to the wall if we could prove we can easily fill in their roles as an interface between inner and outer systems... The question is how do we do it without a slaughter?

>>38146844
Why, we do it by co-opting their own positions. We use their own damn system against them. We buy out contracts, we supply people, we shut them down by buying into their system, then buying it out. We hoist them on their own petard.

Suggestion: micro collectives.

Right now not a necessity, but basically a micro collective is a social structure inside of the collective as a whole, dedicated to some specific task and forming it's own internal rules and purpose amongst it's people provided they don't conflict with the collective as a whole. Basically fill the same purpose as microcorps for the commonwealth.

>>38146919
You mean like a semi-autonomous delegated work unit. Who might detect a target of opportunity. And act on it to a limited extent? And then have comrades try and shit ball them for predicting exactly the kind of internal economic differentiation that comrades are about to suggest anyway?

That's been my experience with pre-fall anarchist economics.

you know? If we survive ten years and get a future template we should totally nab those... Fast growth, high confidence, high adaptability bio morphs would be I credibly useful if we can get the template or design a similar one.

>>38146997
Little confused what you mean... But yeah, basically dedicated units who can act atonamousky without constantly bringing stuff up to the collective? Even though that's probably already a thing with us. Not everything goes up for vote, but for example, micro corps have limited autonomy to get shit done and provide services.

So a micro collective might be, for example, a group of medics and healers who can collect resources autonomously to focus development for medical reasons. Other micro-collectives could support their efforts. So the void-workers micro-collective like having good medical stuff given the danger of their work, so surplus resources above the % they pay directly into the collective to maintain their bare minimum necessary contributions can be given directly to the medical micro-collective. Allows for a more malleable, flexible anarchic structure, McGill maintaining the collective structure.

>>38147056
I was saying that the crew who rescued 2000 minds did exactly what you're suggesting, and people have suggested we jury trial them to shun them or disembody them.

>>38144901
Can we get a pastebin containing our factional stats?

>>38147132
You're right. I was the guy who even suggested that punishment before I sat down and thought about it for 5 minutes. Then I realized what they did was great. I just wish they had been more transparent in their actions. They definitely shouldn't be punished. They made sure the primary objective was completed before taking their chance then only risked themselves.

They didn't actually risk the op. No punishment should be handed down, and a clear message sent that we such independent action should be lauded but transparency should be paramount. We could have saved all 4000 if we'd known about this secondary objective, which we are almost certain was not spur of the moment.

>>38147236
Basically, I'm admitting my knee jerk reaction was misplaced. In the extreme.

>>38147236
>>38147244
I agree. Plus I still feel that the forks we lost were really people, and may really now be eternally suffering in a hellbox.

I am in anguish over that. We need to set blowable stacks. If I died and was unretrievable on a foreign ship, blow my stack, blow my stack, blow my stack. I can imagine how people can make them live. My pre-fall background was as a history tutor in the early 2100s coastal chinese and european wars. You can do horrible things with a captive mind.

>>38147307
We recovered all three casualties cortical stacks I thought? I don't see anything that suggests otherwise...

>>38147335
>In the confusion, they lose one of two briefcases they're hauling.
Oh god, I'm not thinking straight, I obviously don't react bad to trauma. I thought we lost two of the three stacks of ours. My mind is elsewhere.

I mean the two thousand we left behind, at least they won't be punished over this, I hope. God maybe I've said too much, maybe they're listening to our mesh, god is great, god is great, please no, please no don't let them be listening, please no, god is great.

>>38147335
If we didn't then we launch a counter attack right the fuck now. Cut in through the hull, find them asap. No on left behind.

>>38147368
Our personal network is secure friend. We're well out of range right now of their mesh anyway, and out network is entirely internal and incredibly short range barring specific ranged communication units. Basic radio physics prevents them from hearing anything on any of our three vessels.

Also, even if they did hear this, they'd still have no reason to torture those poor egos. They're not in a good place, but they're not in for any worse than they were before. Probably slavery else where. In the system. We can't rescue everyone -yet- but someday we can. Someday we'll go to the holes of slavers and their like, and burn them out. For now, we focus on our own people. Charity is a great virtue, but us you help others so much that you can't help yourself, eventually you end up unable to help anybody.

>>38147500
But the thing is, if I were a slaver, I would make it well known that any attempt to liberate people would result in forking and torture.

>>38147563
Why damage any product or use up space? Also if a slaver did such, it would just bring about impetus to neutralize them entirely rather than make off with their product. For such a threat to be effectivem it would have to be public ally known, they'd have to announce their illegal activities. If they do do that, then I suggest we round up every anarchist ship in orbit, and we go slaver hunting. Nobody likes slavers. Everyone wants an excuse to kill them and burn out their stacks.

>>38147583
So why isn't the general consensus to develop a proposal to go back their and burn out their stacks? We're only anti-slavery up to the point where people want to go mouldering in the grave with John Brown?

>>38147750
It goes back to >>38147500

The Triads are enormous. We could barely afford the risk of going into that place in the first place. And that was when nobody expected us, knew about us, or had a vested interest in harming us.

Now we've kicked the Triads in the balls. If we're lucky? This is a small time operation. If we're unlucky, we've pissed off somebody major and we'll need to rethink future plans.

Right now we need to look after our own.

Remember. Help yourself first, then help others when able. If helping others leaves you unable to help yourself, everyone is hurt.

Martyrdom only functions when you leave behind enough people to be inspired by your example. Are you willing to bet the lives of everyone in the Collective on burning these fuckers down now?

I'm not.

When we have a stable base of operations, more blue prints, I'll personally help any effort to hunt fuckers like this down, but my first duty is to making sure my wife and child get sleeved and are safe. This operation helped that, and we could help some good people along the way.

Right now we remember. We got AR logs and XPs. We can track these fuckers down later.

Someday we'll come back here. Someday we WILL return, and we will burn these fuckers out of their nests. Right now we survive. We beg, borrow, steal whatever it takes, and we never forget what we are doing this for. A better tomorrow, not just for ourselves, but for everyone.

>>38147848
This.

If we burn ourselves out trying to help everybody from the get go, we'll only get ourselves killed. We gotta pick our battles. My first crew back in the Malyasian DMZ never got that, and those who survived learned it right quick. You don't fuck with people unless you have an opening. We had an opening today, a brief window to make a difference with minimum damage. We miscalculated obviously, but it turned out alright in the end. Wish we hadn't lost the second case though.

Point is, we came out net gain from this. Kicked the Triads in the teeth, and if we're lucky it'll boost our @-rep from the get go. g-rep probably just tanked though... ehn, who cares.

Anyway, right now we can make a bigger difference helping out people near the /Bohr/ like some people have been saying. I wasn't on board with it at first, but that survey ship would be pretty damn helpful further out, and they're right. It's our best chance of growing our numbers.

We've shown people we can kickass and take names. If the Triads come after us, we'll just show that even harder. Now we need to show people we're not a bunch of thugs taking what we want, that we're not just another pirate gang you know?

Helping out the UN remnants in their mission seem like a good shot at that, even if I prefer capping ganger and slaver asses.

Suggestion on Military Structure:
1) Entirely volunteer based, but I'd suggest everyone should get some form of weapon's training unless they're a total pacifist.
2) We organize into 5 man units, basically follow: >>38146596
3) Units are expected to work together in VR practice regularly under the right conditions. Trust Units should form the backbone of our military in all aspects.

While individualism is the font of our creativity, the source of inspiration and new things for all of us, all humans are stronger bound together than not! What can be stronger than a group of 5 people who trust each other implicitly because of their training time and the bonding of their minds in combat?

Obviously such a situation shouldn't be constant, only on missions. Probably need to do some neat programming that blocks pain from flooding across the channels and also death trauma, but it could work really well.

>>38147848
So the point is that there are slavers who can threaten to fork and eternally torture their victims if they are attacked, because they are too large to go burn their stacks?

>>38147991
No, the point is that we can't go hunting them NOW, UNLESS they make those threats. If they make those threats, then it'll be pretty easy to get a united hunting group of MANY people together, without that though, most people aren't going to help out in this situation.

They can't make those threats, or carry out those actions, without risking the entire orbit coming the fuck down on them.

Also, again. Why waste time and resources doing such for no purpose except to punish people who MIGHT attack you again... the egos can't take part in their own escape being iced, so pointless to blame them. Forking takes up time and data resources and space. Why spend time on psycho torture of a fork you intend to delete anyway? Why psychotorture the original and thus ruin their sale value?

Slavers don't take slaves because they're sadists. They take them because they intend to resell them at a profit. That Psycho surgery device is likely for use in culling out tendencies from the personalities that would make them bad slaves. They were going to do that anyway, regardless of whether or not we intervened.

>>38148036

I see many of you are not familiar with how 9 Lives operates.

They used to do legit but underground services for backup, forking and resleeving. Now they trade souls. They practice forknapping, illegal psychosurgery and all kinds of things, even if they still offer those original services. This was the spooky boogyman story before the Fall.

9 Lives only recruits hardcore people, or is supposed to. Only the insanely loyal, sadistic or sociopathic can pass their rumored "right" of passage - torturing an ego copy to insanity in simulspace.

Their only business is this business, they don't handle other mundane vices. Many of them do it for fun as much as profit. And the most extreme bloc of their members perform their own warped version of voodoo which is basically "keep what you kill".

So we've either just kicked in what is growing into the monopoly of Ego Slavery, or we kicked in some people who are very soon going to be "bought out" by 9 Lives.

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162 KB JPG

>>38146351
>>38146263
>>38146227
>Can we build some Space Fighters and hangar them in the Horn?
Less this and more pic related, but yes, this is doable.

>>38146211
>Comrade, there's only one outfit crazy enough to into soul trading in this system
Not true. 9 Lives and the ID crew are system-wide cartels as of 10AF, but here, now, they're trying to pick up the pieces, same as anyone else (though they are expanding rapidly due to the high demand for questionably ethical psychosurgery and their own utter ruthlessness).

In this case the rig was, to a first approximation, Triad-affiliated, or at least under triad protection.

>>38145924
>>38146256
>I've been saying to shoot for a C-type asteroid all along.
>I say we shoot for the main belt. 10 Hygeia or that family of C-type asteroids.
Okay. Planning is focused on getting to the main belt. Note that many of the best spots, especially for mining, have already been claimed, but those claims are difficult if not impossible for enforce. For example, say, Legba was a Fa Jing mining facility before it was taken over, with basically no consequences.

Thread summary up here: http://pastebin.com/J0vie6sR

Don't know if those are helpful for anyone else - I make them mostly because it's for me to be able to quickly sort out the progress of events and remember what happened. Does anyone else read them?

Spent way too much time playing around formats and stuff. Writing 'current status' summary now.

+---------------------+
|Current Status |
+---------------------+

Assets:
>Currency
- 33k Lunar Credits
>Reputation:
-
>Other
- 1.3 billion dollars, in Yen, Stocks, and US treasuries
- North African cultural items

Craft:
Large Lander and Orbital Transfer Vehicle *Phoenix*
>Population Capacity 161/150 (4% Adv. Biomorph, 18% Splicer/Flat, 48% Pod, 30% Synth)
>HO Fuel (19/100)
>Armaments: 1x Dorsal Railgun, Disposable Missile Launchers, Small Arms
>Other Assets: CM, 4x Fabbers, Whipple Shield, Infomorph Servers (132)
>Current Action: Diplomacy with Bohr (Other actions available).

Large Lander and Orbital Transfer Vehicle *Persistence of Visions*
>Population Capacity 156/175 (10% Adv. Biomorph, 56% Splicer/Flat, 19% Pod, 15% Synth)
>HO Fuel (19/100)
>Armaments: 1x Dorsal Railgun, Small Arms
>Other Assets: 4x Fabbers
>Current Action: Undergoing Refit

Autonomous Cargo Hauler (Modified) *Horn of Plenty*
>Population Capacity 152/175 (45% Splicer/Flat, 42% Pod, 13% Synth)
>H Fuel (45/100)
>Armaments: Small Arms
>Other Assets: Rocket Buggy x 2, Psychosurgery Gear, Medical Supplies, Moonshine Distillery
>Current Action: None

Habitat Fragment *Ten Star Hotel*
>Population Capacity (20/1500) *No Life Support*
>Armaments: Small Arms
>Other Assets: Salvage Gear, CM, 4x Fabbers, Rocket Buggy.
>Current Action: Salvage Operations (Metals, Silicates, Water)

(cont)

>>38152211
Your morph conditions are POOR; you have NO ability to produce new morphs, and only basic abilities to heal or modify existing morphs. Long term sleeving into morphs designed primarily to be driven by AIs will cause psychological damage, as does long term zero-G exposure to parts of your population that lacks microgravity biomods. Recently recovered medical supplies have begun to alleviate these problems.

You have GOOD software support; you have standard firewalls and patches, with fully unlocked capabilities for design, fabrication, programming and navigation. Simulation spaces are serviceable and comfortable for most individuals. You have recently recovered psychosurgery gear that makes use of psychosurgery corrections feasible for common sources of stress.

You have EXCELLENT Manufacturing capability; with CMs you have the ability to bootstrap infrastructure and produce the tools you need to build the tools; your primary limits are the blueprints you need, exotic materials you lack, and the skilled labor needed to operate or assemble certain items. You have a robotic assembly line for synth morphs, but your needs are beginning to outpace your infrastructure.

>wat do?

(Tough crowd today. I guess the novelty has worn off?)

>>38152220
sorry, waking up still. will be on in about an hour.

I think right now we need to get to the Bohrs and begin setting up operations there. Maybe after picking up the stuff from the Ten Star. We move over to the Bohrs...

also didn't we refuel with the Bohrs? I distinctly remember you writing we topped off our fuel with them.

>>38152304
Also you didn't write into our stats who we rescued from the carolina

>>38152304
before we leave the 10 Star, we need to strip our their old hydroponics system and use it to add a fuel refinery to the Horn of Plenty

>>38152304
>>38152314
Yes. These are copypasta-related errors.

>>38152486
I'm going to work on a story post to put here. so don't worry bro.

>>38152486
Still running?

>>38153625
yes, he runs over hours long periods, hell, technically hes always active as hes taking extended periods away from the computer.

>>38152486
Tell me when you corrected them alright? ALso perhaps a special paste bin JUST for our raw stats and inventory? To make it easier to navigate? Also contains our pod list.

>>38152304
>>38152349

Actual Actions:
>Strip out hydroponics system from Ten Star, Build Fuel Refinery on Horn of Plenty
>Fill up all available storage space on all ships with materials stripped from Ten Star.
>Leave claim beacon and register it with KRS
>Move ships into orbit with Bohrs
>Set one CD to begin replicating itself and make atleast one new CD for both the Vision and the Horn. Then get multiple CDs made for the Horn.
>Set multiple CDs to make a ship parts Fabber for the Horn.

Social Actions:
>Hold collectivist meeting to learn intentions of renegade/heros who launched attack against the Triad ego-slavers. This isn't a trial, this is a chance to clear the air and for everyone to learn where everyone else stands. Honesty and acceptance are the key.
>Negotiate with Bohrs once we arrive there to give them access to our Fabbers and our help in their helping of other ships that pass through, build our rep up by helping everyone we can, occasional salvage runs to bring material stocks back up to help people repair their ships. Also offer to upgrade ships (not just repair them) if they can offer use morphs, equipment, materials, or blue prints in exchange. Repairs and such we give for free, upgrades are something we have to ask more in exchange for since it means using up time we could be using to help other refugees.


Also....>>38152211
Shouldn't the Horn have way the fuck more capacity than that?

>>38153938
I'm iffy on laying a permanent claim on the Ten Star since we're going to be lighting out for the Belt. Unless we can somehow lease or trade the salvage rights for dosh, it's fairly pointless.

>>38154000
I say we just lay the claim for now, then sell them off to KRS for other things once we leave. My big deal is that I want us to get our CD OFF of that damn thing NOW. We just kicked a hornets nest, and out of every instalation we have? The Ten Star is the most vulnerable, and the most valuable.

So we need to move one of our armed ships near it, complete salvage operations, then get the CD off of it right the fuck now. Hell, even just moving the CD off of it, even if it slows salvage operations would be a really really REALLY good idea.

>>38154039
We don't have a CM on the Ten Star, I don't think. They're both on the Phoenix.

>>38153938
To narrow this down for next turn:
>Remove CD from Ten Star, even if it slows salvage operations. Move some of our Rocket Launchers over there as we continue salvage operations. Bring the hydroponics systems over with the CD.
-Hold Collectivist Meeting between all 3 ships and hash our what exactly happened, and what our response should be. Make it clear punishment isn't what we want to do, at least not yet. We want a firm understanding FOREMOST, then to decide what to do.

>>38154064
No, read the listing of our assets. We moved one there to speed up operations, that's not a copy pasta error. I remember it clearly.

We have lasers right? It should, in theory, be relatively simple to make a point defense system for our ships, although the asteroid belts are relatively safe, a laser point defense system would keep debris from fucking us over, as well as acting as a missile defense system and a (borderline illegal) anti boarding system. It also would allow minimum armament that could possibly hurt some enemy craft if they were unarmored.

>>38154375
I like this theory, we should definitely do this once we're underway. Right now we've got a plan set up for our fabbers that's going to take away time.

Though slowly adding onto our ships with these over time is probably a good idea.

>>38149945
>Not true. 9 Lives and the ID crew are system-wide cartels as of 10AF, but here, now, they're trying to pick up the pieces, same as anyone else (though they are expanding rapidly due to the high demand for questionably ethical psychosurgery and their own utter ruthlessness).
>In this case the rig was, to a first approximation, Triad-affiliated, or at least under triad protection.

ID crew handles the underground services like darkcasts and illicit forking, but I was under the impression from later materials on 9 Lives are the people who specialize in forknapping, ego trading and underground psychosurgery. They don't take competition light, neither.

But if it was a triad rig trying to cut in on 9 Lives, well, good luck to those guys. The Egos are probably marginally better off, going to get sleeved into wage slavery in Pods on Mars of Qing Long. At least the Triads aren't a unified front.

I would also like to withdraw any support for docking with Qing Long now, BTW.

>>38154556
Either way, our chances of finding those 2000 other egos is slim to none. They'll have gone to ground and left by now.

>>38154616
Left how? Does the Carolina Days even have any egocasting gear?

>>38153938
>Shouldn't the Horn have way the fuck more capacity than that?
Yes. Er. It should be 500ish.

>>38154375
>We have lasers right? It should, in theory, be relatively simple to make a point defense system for our ships
The hard part with the lasers isn't making the beam itself, it's the large, precise lenses, the sensors, and the targeting software. Absent that, they're just a short range railgun that can't penetrate armor. Your sensors, power generation, etc, are still woeful subpar for something that needs to fight.

>>38154656
>Left how? Does the Carolina Days even have any egocasting gear?
Left by any of the dozens of parasites that have attached themselves to the /Carolina Days/ , or found someone else with an egocasting rig. Or they're still there but lying low - it's not like it would be easy to find them if they didn't want to be found.

Every time I sit down to write an update something goes wrong and I'm desperately needed to fix things.

>>38154656
They have rocket sleds, other ships docked in the Carolina, and probably more of that dark casting gear like the one we picked up. There's at least a dozen other proto-scum barges that weren't enough to be a blip on our radar, other stations, other groups.

If you just got hammered and lost half your stock to a completely unknown foe who apparently was well armed enough to grab the shit, then extract all of their people, even if 3 of them were cortical stacks... what would you do?

I'd sure as hell not stay where I was. I'd bug the hell out. Especially when I learned this was the same group that managed to extract 30 people from a hellhole of a scum barge and then get out, fighting one of the cartels the entire way.

Even if they did stay, they'll have fortified the hell up. If we go back in, we have to take an entirely different route, possibly compromising complete innocents in the matter. This isn't like the last time, where we could negotiate our way and had the element of surprise. We go in again? It's going to be a blood bath.

>>38154705
That's why you need to keep a pastebin of JUST stats. Nothing else. None of the extra info like the pastebin you currently have. Make it clean, concise, and you update it clearly every time you make an update that effects our stats. It just makes life easier to have clean, simple notes and keep them up to date.

>>38154375
>>38154429

Omni-directional laser pods seem pretty common. We should consider mounting a few on the Horn (which probably doesn't have maneuverability to evade missiles) and maybe on the Phoenix. It'd be less destructive than the railgun. We can also consider building point defense vehicles. We'll need to improve our over-all ability though, I don't think we have pervasive targeting-quality LIDAR or anything.

>>38152220

What's our projection list like? Have we suggested anything new we need to go over?

Otherwise, pulling up stakes from the 10 Star with as much raw materials as we can move, recovering the CM and selling the rights to KRS might be worth doing.

We also wanted to build another CM and some more fabbers to round out the Horn's fabrication shop - if we can.

Also, I say we have our aerospace guy(s) design a light-weight parasite fighter design and fab a prototype. We'll call it Thunderbolt 1. If we can, have some of the infomorphs start doing practice simulspaces and see if we can find a good pilot as our test pilot.

We should also talk to the Bohr about their operational needs and commitments. What projects they have, etc. Network, build reputation. Only go claim jumping or skimming LEO if we have to.

>>38154109

I will also second a transparent and open inquisition into the incident. Let's determine IF there is a charge before we settle into attempting to prove that charge. Though an open inquest will damage future "impartiality".

>>38154656

Pretty sure we stole it. Oh, if we have or compsci/networking guys refit it, we can build an egocast rig. We can accept and transmit egos and forks around the system, that'll improve our networking.

>>38154776
Agreed on all fronts for decisions.

But for the 10 Star, we need to strip out the hydroponics system and build a HO refinery on board the Horn. At the same time we move our CM to the Horn as well and have it begin fabbing a second and third CMs, one of which will go to the Vision.

Then we strip our holds full of what's left of the Ten star, bring the materials over to the Bohrs, and help them out.

When we leave orbit, we'll sell the salvage rights to the Ten Star to KRS.

>>38154705
>Every time I sit down to write an update something goes wrong and I'm desperately needed to fix things.
CM, you need to calm your tits, or at the very least make your plans a lot more flexible. It'll speed up update times enormously. Also definitely go with >>38154748 's suggestion.

Organize your vital stat notes first and foremost. It helps everyone out. If you like I can set up a public paste bin for you that includes just the relevant stats?

>>38154911

I think he means IRL he's called away.

>>38154928
Ah. I thought he might have meant the problems with updates and us changing things on him from what he's predicted, which is what he said takes up most of his time in the other updates.

>>38154928
Got it in one.

-----

The first thing that happens on the return to the Horn of Plenty - happens well before the crew gets back to the Horn of plenty, across the expanded information network that spans all three ships and links in to more than one Autonomist networks - why did they do it? What did they grab? The ringleader, a young Chinese woman in a worker pod, shrugs and is non-committal at first, but as the /Carolina Days/ retreats into the distance, parts of the story gradually come out.

The facility that was attacked was Sun Yee On - affiliated. In the post-Fall chaos, the triad has moved, wherever it has members, to control access to new markets, allow their still-trapped members to escape, and to recruit fresh blood and egos who have nowhere else to turn. The ringleader heard about the facility through a loose conglomeration of social networks used by the Triads, heard that it was being used to both forcibly recruit and loyalty test potential candidates, and to extort infugees who wanted to be elsewhere, and decided that they were going to liberate it while they had the chance. According the her, she'd know about it since before the raid was officially being planned.

As to the reasoning, the main goal, according to the leader, was to secure any valuable equipment for the collective. Psychosurgery gear was high on the list of priorities. As to why keep it secret? Because it was going to result in violence, and a good chunk of the collective was adamantly anti-violence, and objected to doing anything other than trade. "You would have said no." she says, simply, when asked.

Of course, that's not the whole story. She won't - or can't - name specific sources. And at least *some* of the assault team and mission control had to have known. It's not clear whether or not those people were all survivors from the Horn, or if they had help from the Phoenix.

Yes the ringleader's gender changed. They're a pod. Deal with it.

>>38155234
Given the circumstances?

I think they're in the right. Our image before WAS strictly anti-violent.

But I think we need to make something clear.

The Collective is not pacifistic, and the opposite of such in certain cases. The whole point of a cyberdemocracy is that it allows full autonomy to it's members. Without autonomy, there is no meaning to the democracy itself. It becomes a sham.

If they had told us their goals? I would have added it as an objective in it's own right to the list of objectives for this. Slavers are the worst scum, and we could have dealt them a MUCH more grevious blow and rescued more people.

That said, given our actions until now? I think they acted sensibly, and they did their best to prevent any of the blowback from coming on anybody but their own people.

They should be rewarded for their initiative, the 3 who lost their morphs given synth morphs in the next production run, and it made clear that as a Collective, we are not afraid to use violence to get what we need, especially from entities who cannot, or should not, be negotiated with.

>>38155359
I disagree strongly. While their goals may have been laudable, they used collective resources /unilaterally/, possibly endangering the collective itself in the process. This is /theft/, and they are /thieves./ The fact that we would have approved of their actions if they had submitted them for approval beforehand has no bearing on that fact.

>>38155234

So I think we found our first Intelligence agent.

So to summarize:
-They got the intel through Guanxi contacts (that's the name for the major criminal social network, first developed by the orbital triads) they can't or won't disclose
-They acted only to obtain benefit for the collective
-They did not inform the collective because they felt it wouldn't draw majority consensus, but in doing so took all the personal risk onto themselves

I recommend the following:
-No punishment for the surviving members. Not even penal work duty. They acted on their autonomy and no direct harm was done to our members, there's no charge to be made here.
-The slain members should be inserted into the morph cue under normal circumstances, no faster or slower than anybody else. They acted with autonomy knowing the dangers, we won't punish them for it, but we shouldn't give them special treatment either.
-Phoenix Command needs to have a chat with our ring-leader, maybe see about establishing and supplying a small, connective work-group to handle delicate matters of opportunity presented to the collective with expediency. This way there can be some knowledge aforethought and oversight, but they can also claim sufficient operational authority to still get things done and advise the directorial or executive members (even if that's a rapidly rotating system of equals) of new intelligence. If it goes wrong, we can either deny or roll back to transparency and let dice fall where they may, if it goes right, well, stuff happens.

>>38155488
>but in doing so took all the personal risk onto themselves
That is obviously false. You think the Triads we just pissed off will bother to make the distinction between the Horn of Plenty and the Collective as a whole? Fuck no they're not.

>>38155466
Actually, beyond the weapons and equipment, they used... they risked ONLY their own morphs, not collective given ones.

I'm fully on board with: >>38155488
And I say that we use this to formalize the Mirco-collective system proposed earlier in the thread ( >>38146919 and >>38147056 )

Microcollectives can pursue goals and objectives outside of the main concensus, but they have to be transparent in their purposes to a certain degree (telling us general goals and objectives) and are expected to give back resources equal or greater than what they take from the Rebirth Collective as a whole.

Given the circumstances? I argue they have fulfilled that very important condition. They brought back resources much greater than the loss of 3 suits of armor, 3 morphs, and 3 sets of boarding equipment.

>>38155488
Agreeing with this post.

We need an intelligence branch with some level of transparency and oversight to the main collective, but still able to operate separately from the collective as a whole. This is why I argue the micro-collective system.

>>38155536
This is true. But I ask you this. Will the Triads waste resources attacking 3 armed and armored craft with decent comp-sec and is now probably fairly popular with the powers that be? Provided we don't go nettling them further -yet-?

Our end game is always going to end with us abolishing the ego slaving trade eventually. System wide. No reason not to get that clear to everyone right now.

>>38155536

Right, but we would have accepted those long-term risks had we been apprised of the situation - probably (this is the impression I get anyway).

They took all the active risk onto themselves, minimized direct association, and directly benefitted us. Are we demanding every member check in with the collective for consensus before they do anything? We can't micromanage everyone.

When we gave them weapons, we implicitly authorized them to use them to the best of their judgement. As I'm fairly certain we did not discuss or formalize rules of engagement before the over-all operation. Based on sensitive information, they acted using the implied authority and explicit autonomy, suffering the personal consequences in an action the political & strategic consequences we would have shouldered anyway.

What are we going to prove by punishing them? Who will we offer restoration to? Are we achieving specific or general deterrence by doing so? We don't want them to act exactly the same in future, but what benefit does society have by calling for punishment?

>>38155642
>This is true. But I ask you this. Will the Triads waste resources attacking 3 armed and armored craft with decent comp-sec and is now probably fairly popular with the powers that be? Provided we don't go nettling them further -yet-?
>Our end game is always going to end with us abolishing the ego slaving trade eventually. System wide. No reason not to get that clear to everyone right now.
This is only true if we move NOW

We pull our CM from the Ten Star, and then we move into close support with the Bohrs, offering support immediately. We put weaponry on the rocket sleds we send on salvage missions, and we strip the defunct hydroponics system from the Ten Star in order to make a fuel refinery on the Horn.

What's done is done. We never were going to play nice with the Triads from the beginning. We now move to secure our assets to the best of our ability. Up the guard on the ten star, up the speed of stripping it, formally lay a salvage claim and beacon to later sell it off (claims on both sides of it by the way).

Then we continue stripping it down to help supply the Bohrs and our opperations there to endear them to us, build up our @-Rep, and probably build up other Reps as well.

Then when we can, we make off for the freaking main belt.

>>38155701
Absolutely this.

We're an autonomous collective. We cannot go forward if we put too many checks and balances in place. Collectivism is the key, we deal with issues as they crop up, and we need to set up systems to deal with micromanagement NOW.

So I say the Micro-collective system.

Guys, before anything else.

Can we agree (and get the CM to write up) the one thing we agree on?

We have to secure our assets against counter attack right now.

That means moving the CM out of the Ten Star and to the Horn. That means getting the hydroponics system out of the Ten Star and into the Horn. That most importantly means that we need to bulk up our defenses of the Ten Star salvage teams.

Can we agree to that course of action -right- the fuck now?

Then we deal with the social implications.

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Rolled 79, 39, 28, 74 = 220 (4d100)

>>38153938
PS, going with these actions for now. All told, doing all of this shit should take about a month assuming no emergencies like being attacked by Triads or Ultimates or something happens.

Additional decisions:
>What kind of missions will you accept with the Phoenix? Salvage ops in MEO?
>What are you going to do with your newly acquired medical gear and people?

>>38155234
ok since they did what they did for good reasons but in doing so endangered the mission and possibly drew the ire of the triads towards the collective they should be counted out on away missions until they can prove themselves to be more trustworthy. The 3 who lost their morphs should be placed in the line to get morphs and the ringleader should lose her morph privileges for a month (or until the 3 who lost their morphs are resleeved whichever comes first). I'm not against having an intelligence agency but I'm not sure if she's the one to lead it because I feel we would probably want a person who would report in at least to someone before taking off on a unilateral move like she did, that said we might as well talk to her and earmark her for inclusion in the group when it is formed.

>>38155823
Before you do! Please! Make sure to include these: >>38155774

>>38155823
What exactly did we acquire in terms of people?

With medical gear, we pirate the shit out of it first. We figure out how to fab new versions of it and copy the software from one to another. We jailbreak if we have to, but we make sure it's replicatable.

Missions to accept with the Phoenix? Salvage missions and rescue missions. We're fairly heavily armed for a ship of our sort, so we can escort some ships, and we can rescue people and bring them back to the Bohrs or to a place like KRS, some place they can get out from.

One of the things though is we want blue prints for the following things:
>Fusion Reactor
>Healing Vats
>Gear to make pods and biomorphs

Also, part of our negotiations to help the Bohrs is rights to get copies of their software and blue prints to their various systems. They don't need to give them to us all at once, but as time goes on it'd be appreciated if they give them to us in return for helping out their humanitarian missions.

>>38155874
>>38155536
>>38155466
disagree with these

agree with these:
>>38155359
>>38155488
>>38155642
>>38155701

>>38155823
>Missions
Continued salvage ops, probably. If anyone offers to pay for fabber cycles, I wouldn't say no, but I suspect most of our cycles are going to be used internally for the forseeable future.
>New gear
Patch up any chronic health issues, give everyone medichines, work on duplicating them. All the obvious stuff. Get to work sleeving the infugees (not the ones recoved from the Triads).

>>38155939
Missions should be working to improve relations with the Bohrs and the ships they're helping. Build our convoy through those methods.

We also shouldn't say no to military ops against criminal groups and slavers and pirates.

Let's go full Hero mode on this.

>>38155823

>What kind of missions will you accept with the Phoenix? Salvage ops in MEO?

If that's what's paying - directly or indirectly. I don't want to do LEO unless we have to.

We're looking for power generation (Solar, Fission, Fusion), sensors, advanced nanomedicine and cloning tech, Mesh networking, and maybe comms/nav gear.

>>What are you going to do with your newly acquired medical gear and people?

We need to break down a small amount of the medical equipment to enable mass production. What exactly do we have? If we can, we should see about medichines/biomods runs on any biomorphs who lack them.

As for the people, what are their skills? We know they have good quality morphs - Exalts, Bouncers (maybe a Menton or Olympian or two), but what skills do they have? If they're just medical, have them organize a work group and build a list they need for a full, colony-size medical suite, and build a sick bay in the Horn. Otherwise we need to assign them work detail according to skills.

>>38155823

Oh, and if we're discussing fab time and we're not fully committed to repairs and expanding the production line, we should see about the prototyping a fighter design. Definitely have some of the infomorph people see about learning to fly one.

>>38156104
I have an idea on that front actually.

Could we build a info-morph run carrier? No life support systems, really heavily dedicated comp-sec gear. Basically a giant fighter-beehive?

We have plenty of infomorphs right now, such a thing would be pretty awesome.

>>38155906
Yup.

Even as the debate rages on the internal network, the external consequences of the collective's actions are reflected across the wider system network. The autonomist network, @-list, has vaguely approved of the collective's actions, but they've been so insular - and so unwilling to commit to broader autonomist ideals and groups, or to give out freely without asking for direct items in return - their social capital with the autonomists remains positive but stagnant.

In the mean time, the Ocean 55, the Triad affiliate that was attacked, asks for restitution for the unprovoked attack, saying that "as the attack was by a rogue group, there's no need for your organization to be shamed by their actions, provided you are willing to pay restitution". The collective all but laughs in their face; even if the "leadership" was inclined to be diplomatic or pragmatic, it would be political suicide. As a result, your reputation declines among the loose affiliation of social networks collectively referred to as /guanxi/ , not so much for your attack - organizations attack each other all the time, that's just business - but for an inability to control what are apparently subordinate units.
>@-rep: 10
>g-rep: -10

>>38156126
So what you're saying is basically a metal shell with a reactor, sensors, some point defense systems, lots of armory storage and repair systems, and oversized fuel tanks with an engine?

Has a honeycomb like structure? Fighters enter it and leave it? Perhaps reverse honey comb, fighters enter from rear ports, then launch from side or front ports, running through an assembly line structure that repairs, rearms, and refuels the fighter before launching it again?

Sounds super efficient and super deadly. We should seriously consider it.

>>38156126
>>38156276

We could build a fighter equipped escort carrier sure, but proper military vessels run on antimatter engines or high powered fusion reactions. I also think building an actual military-grade ship in another polity's territory might also raise alarm bells, and the LLA has inherited a lot of spacecraft from some of Earth's former space navies. We'd also probably want enhanced military servers to give all the infomorphs running it a combat oriented boost. Such a server cluster would be highly expensive and specialized, however.

We should save full blown production of pocket escort carriers until we're somewhere more open and have stronger power generation. For now parasite fighters for the Horn as our largest craft could work. Though we have LLOTVs, we might be able to tuck a couple onto the Phoenix or Vision as escort "drones".

>>38156127

Sometimes I forget how dickish the AA can be

>implying we have enough physical resources or a solid enough reputation scheme to give resources for promise of future favors

Maybe out past the Belt, but "c'mon, we're cool guys" isn't going to get us very far in Earth Orbit.

>>38156330
I like this idea. We should save the pocket carrier for a later date.

From what I've read from the EP book. Civilization has not adapted to proper Transhuman Warfare yet.

It's time to change that. I'm working on a primer of transhuman warfare and how it should be planned and operated. The function of warfare in the transhuman period is very, very, very, very different than any conventional warfare.

The Ultimates think they have it down. But they're wrong. Dead wrong. Small Unit tactics are only part of the deal today.

The most important thing though, is going to be the mass production of emergency farcaster cortical stacks. Hell, even if we can make them emergency upload short range ones, then it'll be fine. But the point is, in post scarcity, the ability to make a mobile army factory is the most important thing in any conflict.

Communications, cyberwarfare, even basic logistics all fall a part in post scarcity conflict because what becomes MOST important is one's ability to manipulate matter on the battlefield. If an army can scavenge morphs and bodies from the field, feed them into a fabber, that then outputs new forces that contain former casualties who were uploaded to the mobile factory server, then everything on the battle changes entirely.

Conflict in EP is still fought as if conditional immortality isn't a thing, as if the people killed STAY dead. This isn't the case. We can change the face of warfare quickly, and brutally, by focusing on high end combat synths over biomorphs. Even Furies and Remakes will fall apart against this strategem.

Give us time brothers. We can remake the face of warfare in such a way that our opponents will shatter against us. But we must take full advantage of the powers granted to us by our new technologies.

Lets get some damn point defense systems, some basic snooping/perimeter detection systems (something that literally just scans electrical/radio activity and sends ping to command if activity in area spikes, would stop anyone who doesn't use radio silence or who tries to be visually sneaky only, wont do much against actual dedicated attacks sadly, at least it can only be shut down also, can't be used to hack us as it literally can only send basic positive/negative data.

>>38156330
The AA has unrealistic expectations for a lot of things. We can deal with it. Our @-Rep will skyrocket once we hit the Belt and commit fully to the AA.

>>38156547
sounds good to me.

Also, CM. Did some checking in the books.

Download speed of egos is lightning fast. The only reason that resleeving requires specilized equipment is because of the necessary on the fly reprogramming the ego has to undergo to take control of one sleeve or another. If you're just sending an infomorph ego? It's fast as lightning. Bandwidth issues are NEVER a problem. All information can be transferred instantaneously, limited only by the speed of light, the strength (eg: range) of the transmission equipment, and one's ability to find that information.

>>38156513

Our willingness to go "Transhuman" in warfare was also hampered by building military Seed AIs which tried to eat our collective face.

Now, you've given some good points we should consider, but emergency farcasters in an actual emergency sense are very expensive, because they use a mote of antimatter for a neutrino burst. But regular backups are also possible, as might be stack recovery.

Also, biomorphs and even pods take a long time to complete. Synths can be fabricated much faster, but suffer from certain amount of proportional complexity and expense. A Reaper (basically a one man tank morph) is noticeably more expensive than a Fury, or moreso a simple Olympian. And because we'd be trying to build them quicker, that expense will catch up to us faster, in terms of materials for sure. Resleeving after a violent death is also traumatic, you need time to rest and adapt psychologically. You're thinking an instantaneous turn around, but the fact is it would still be hours or more likely days of replenishment. All while still consuming physical resources.

This says nothing of the space-level game, where we will be outstripped by military vessels with antimatter drives, tactical nuclear and antimatter weapons and enhanced military computers. We might be able to zerg rush in the "ground" theater, but until we build a huge futuretech base, the heavy hitters in the system will easily be able to push us around. This is why eventual AA support is important, the Titanian Commonwealth has a large Fleet and access to an antimatter production facility.

>>38156826
I agree with this, but I still think transhuman warfare is something transhumanity hasn't caught up with very well.

Also an emergency farcaster uses that mote of antimatter to get information out no matter the distance in the star system. You can be on pluto and wake up on mars with an emergency farcaster.

But what if you had a shorter range tool? Something that requires not nearly as much power to launch? Thus being less expensive? Sure, it would be more vulnerable than the farcaster, but a short range burst to a nearby mobile factory would do wonders.

The way we counter act cost is the Alpha Centauri way. The mobile factories salvage what's on the field and use it to fuel rebuilding and repairs of armed forces.

We can also program the emergency telecom units to send information just before actual death sets in. No death trauma. Like ejecting from a cockpit. Obviously it's not going to work 100% of the time, so those who experience actual death trauma are sent back to a full recovery base, while those who hit the mental 'eject' button can get by on far less.

My argument is that for the foreseeable future, once we have established ourselves suitably. We focus everything we have into reducing the cost of our own fabbrication technology. We go full blown diamond age as hard as we can.

>>38156826
on the space front, I still think these rules of warfare are applicable... I'm still working on that idea but give me time. You'll see.

My point is that synths are superior war platforms to biomorphs except in specialized mission roles.

Basically I think we should go like these guys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factions_in_Revelation_Space#Conjoiners

Transhuman warfare changes a lot of things, both in and out of space, and I'm not convinced that the powers that be in the system have learned how to operate properly even in space warfare... especially not the Jovians, who make them the perfect eventual test bed for these theories.

>>38156998
>>38156968

Well, there's a version of the regular backup which can be installed in a Cyberbrain (or more commonly run with an Infomorph) which can be directed to a server of your choice. And transferring an Ego from a cyberbrain takes significantly less time, though doing so in this way also adds to the stress on the Ego because you lose Continuity. You encounter existential dread of how "real" you are, similar to having a recall of your death. How do you know you actually ejected, as opposed to us using a fork of you when your original continuity "died" out there? What if that continuity of you still exists? It's different, but similar problems.

Also, I wonder at how much a mobile recovery would replenish. Obviously, units damage enough to "die" have significant entropy that needs repairing. And if you recycle from the enemy, I wonder how much of a reaper or Guard rendering an Olympian or a Security Pod down builds? They're not 100% compatible materials.

Also, one critical aspect being forgotten here, Cyberbrain hacking. We can build pretty good cyberdefenses, but ultimately it's possible for people to get into cyberbrains and subvert them or upload harmful programs to them, which they will try very hard to do when we field all combat synths all the time. While in the actual EP game, Combat Hacking is too slow to be practical - interpersonal combat resolves to quickly - on the strategic scale of this Civ, we do not have that luxury. Pure reliance on synths or pods is unwise.

I'm not saying it's not the start of a solid strategy, just don't go counting all your eggs. There are limitations to this tech which exists, and it doesn't do much when somebody evaporates our colony(s) with antimatter warheads.

>>38157069

The Jovians whose military will eventually be experimenting with all Infomorph crews in boosted servers, using designs originating from the best in Military Spacecraft the Pan-Am nations could make?

>>38157227
I thought the Jovians hated that kind of shit and would go with all zero crews? Or are they not quite that stupid?

Also, I have to agree with you there, putting all our eggs in one basket is idiotic, there's a multifaceted aspect to war, but I think that such things can really swing how war is fought on an entirely different level.

Anyway, it's a pointless argument right now since we don't have the industrial base to manage it.

>>38157227

Basically, short version: I think it's a sound strategy which can go places, but don't claim to have found the "silver bullet" yet. Factions in EP don't actively go to war because they have very little to benefit from it, it would just end up with a lot of space junk and salted fields. Engagements are usually tactical, because you want to control something or somewhere. We can't know exactly how a total war scenario would go. Though Direct Action likes the shock and awe.

>>38157301

The Jovian public has a strong bioconservative and religious background, which the Jovian government and military uses to leverage it's populace. Their scientists have access to all the same tech as the general EP setting, just they keep most of it carefully locked up in labs until they've made it extremely safe by comparative standards, if at all.

An Infomorph crewed Destroyer could be suicide forks, or forks to reintegrate, or selected from loyal volunteers authorized to backup, or operated on remote.

And the average Jovian career soldier is a hardened Fall veteran who makes extensive use of cyberware and combat exoskeletons. The only real limit is that they would experience a much higher attrition rate in the sense of permadeath. But they also have a very high volume of soldiers, every Jovian citizen has had years of military training and work to earn their citizenship. Theoretically every adult (And by adult I mean 15+) in the Republic can pick up a rifle. Or will, anyway, we're only a year after the Fall, they're probably not organized yet, but we're not going to be big enough for such an action for a few years at least either.

>>38157498
Makes sense. But I still think they'd be an easier target than say, the Hypercorps if we go picking our first war of conquest.

My big issue is this. The way things are going? Humanity is on the edge of extinction, an it MUST be united under a single banner.

The Hypercorp method would just send us back into the old, failed, system of Earth itself. Everything fell a part EXACTLY because of totaletarian behavior. All the previous governmental systems failed, and now we all know it.

The AA is still trying to figure out how to make the collectivist, post-scarcity economy work on a large scale. Titan has ALMOST managed it, but are seriously hampered by some of their hard and fast rules.

Before we can even begin to draw up plans. We need to prove that our method functions, on a large scale. That we can effectively run a large scale civ of multiple millions on a post scarcity pure rep economy without splintering into thousands of factions and being unable to coordinate.

Titan already proves this is BASICALLY possible.

If we can achieve it on a scale of total rep-economy, not a transitional one like the Titanians (who are BASICALLY transitional with their social currency) and the Extropians. We have already established the most dangerous possible precedent against the Hypercorps.

We'll have proven that hierarchy isn't necessary to run a large scale civilization.

At that point? It's time to start picking targets. We begin to build our military by specifically hunting and exterminating/converting any factions that are known threats to others. Exhuman predator packs, singularity seekers who have no qualms testing titan shit on other habitats or try to force others to undergo the singularity, pirates and criminal groups.

Once we've established the effectiveness of our collectivist military? It's time to choose a target.

Do we go after the Jovians? Or the Extropians?
>cont.

>>38157670
I'd argue Jovians first since we could effectively unity the AA against them in one full blown attack.

Warring against the Extropians from the getgo would just fracture the AA. Only by proving fully, and without question, that @ is in control of the outer system, can we secure control of the mainbelt and begin to cull out the transitional economies that keep people in debt slavery.

Hell, I bet we can hammer the Ultimates into line with us as well, IF we have enough success to prove that we're the next step in the evolution of society.

>>38157670

Oh, I mean, if we're picking a military & strategic target, Jupiter is a good one, as it's one of the few places in the system you can make Antimatter, has heavy industrial capacity already, we'd probably be bros with Europa if we can loosen up the Jovian hold on the system. But I think the Supremacy victory is a little ways off.

>>38157797
Its also radioactive as fuck. We don't want to be anywhere near it unless we want to brick all of our servers and kill all the biomorphs we have.

>>38157797
I'll settle for outer-system supremacy victory. The only thing really holding the AA back from going toe-to-toe with the Hypercorps is the Jovian stranglehold on Jupiter, which is PITIFULLY exploited compared to the levels it could be exploited at if the Jovians actually used proper fucking transhuman tech.

Jupiter, while dangerous, is quite possibly the Lynch Pin of the entire damn system. It's moons are replete with heavy elements, it's magnetosphere is potentially strong enough to generate power from without anything else involved. The gravity well is perfect for synthesizing materials that otherwise couldn't be grabbed at.

Sure, it's massive gravity makes traditional cloud mining almost impossible, but there are ways around that I'm pretty sure if we used morphs adapted from the Coronals.

Right now? The only reason that the Jovians don't rule the system is that they lack the distributed technology necessary to properly exploit Jupiter. If somebody with ACTUAL technical know how, distributed on a wide base, came in? They'd own the most important planet in the system after Earth (which is more valuable simply as potential living space if it can be cleansed and repaired).

So yeah.
Step 1) Make a full New Economy System Function on a Large Scale
Step 2) Test transhuman warfare theories on pirates and other antiethical elements that nobody is going to miss if we terminate them.
Step 3) Refine methods
Step 4) Attack the Junta
Step 5) ???
Step 6) Profit.

>>38157928
That's the thing. If we exploited it, we'd have to do it with properly modified morphs developed to exist in that environment (they already do in the few non Junta habitats on the moons there).

The aftermath of the the /Carolina Days/ situation is inconclusive. Those who died are put back into the morph queue, but with no special penalty or bonus. Those who are ultimately responsible are not brought to any kind of justice, the collective valuing the individual freedom of action - and success - that came as a result. Though tensions are heightened, the mixed crews and the sense of relief at having accomplished their goals. The squad leader fades into the background and resumes normal work (or, perhaps, not).

With the immediate issue resolved and a way forward clear, the collective focuses on its strengths and dedicates the majority of its efforts to getting in the Bohr, producing rockets for its longer upcoming journey, and conducting diverse salvage operations. As part of the heightened threat environment they find themselves in, they withdraw from the Ten Star Hotel with the largest fragments of materials that they can cut away to be boosted into higher orbit, along with hydroponics systems and a few other fragments. As they leave, the crew reports that several sections of the habitat appear to spontaneously incinerate themselves, like someone set off some superthermite charges - but they're already on the way back, and have no time to investigate.

Freeing up a fabber for doing engineering work from salvage increases your speed and gives you more slack with the Bohr, but you also lose your ability to process raw materials. You have to be more careful about what feedstock you can use or trade away. (cont)

>>38157928
>>38157961

We can engineer synthmorphs which resist ionizing radiation, and most computer storage in EP is designed or sufficiently shielded to withstand that kind of thing. Also, you don't hang around out on the surface where the radiation melts your face, you dig into and around. We plug the materials and tech into the design, Jupiter has fairly efficient habs for that (the so-called "Reagan Cylinders"). I mean, EP has surface mining on venus and whales in the Sun. It has oceanic habs under Ceres and Europa, and cloud skimming morphs sailing the skies of Uranus and Neptune. Think of a hostile environment, transhumanity can find a method to adapt. Or will, at any rate. Just need the R&D.

>>38158101
Exactly. Jupiter is HARDLY the least habitable portion of the system.

>>38158008
Looks like we'll have to run salvage missions to grab fabber materials. Hand them over to the Bohr's to refine in return for fabbing parts for their humanitarian mission.

We'd better arm the rocket sleds with at least missile pods.

>>38158340

If by missile pods, you mean "give them a pile of MANPADS to use", then yes.

>>38158393
I was more thinking of strapping a series of tubes with rockets loaded into them 'project metalstorm' style and controlled by an infomorph residing inside of the rocket sled.

>>38158440

I mean, if we can build missile launchers, we can probably put them in a block and link them to a computer trigger. The fighters we're discussing designing are supposed to have missiles too.

Traditional seekers are fired using coilgun to fire the initial projectile which then propels itself via scramjet/gyrojet tech to the target. I don't know if the same principles would apply to the ship-based missiles, though.

>>38158509
>Traditional seekers are fired using coilgun to fire the initial projectile which then propels itself via scramjet/gyrojet tech to the target. I don't know if the same principles would apply to the ship-based missiles, though.
Only difference might be that they use rail instead of coil.

>>38158008
>As they leave, the crew reports that several sections of the habitat appear to spontaneously incinerate themselves, like someone set off some superthermite charges - but they're already on the way back, and have no time to investigate.

I believe we should heighten the alert on any dead data obtained from 10*. If the actual materials are infectious, it doesn't matter, they'll spread through KRS's on selling like a virus, and there's nothing we can do to quarantine that.

Making up for that is the Phoenix's salvage runs. Your crew is becoming increasingly experienced salvage crews, and you've netted a tidy amount of valuable cargo - some of it is things like amounts of gold, silver, and other things (some in wiring, others in sentimental objects that can be disposed of). You find a few things worth keeping, like radiator and solar arrays that you can bring up and either affix to the /Horn/ or leave in a close parking orbit. The Phoenix takes some damage in the process; despite plans to build laser defenses, the damage is never enough to justify taking the fabber cycles to build serious point defenses, or the time from the incredibly busy engineers.

Having parts of your fleet in contact with the Bohr and the steady stream of refugees docking with it and exchanging what resources they have gives you an ample opportunity to recruit whole ships or fragments of the population with skills. The latter isn't terribly successful, simply because few are willing to abandon their ships; those that are have found better places already. But you are capable of extracting a few dozen more willing members; your now-known ability to extract people who want out has something of a cooling effect on those who might decide that their members can't leave. It makes you some friends, but also some enemies among the refugees. The former goes better than you expected, with another three ships willing to join your collective, and another four willing to travel with you for a time, but there's a catch - the more you recruit, the more plasma rockets you need to produce to make your journey. Either you need to reinvest in infrastructure, or take who you have and go. The /Bohr/ might be willing to go with you, if you can get a united front with the other refugee ships. (cont)

The 'Persistence of Vision' has benefited the most from the advanced medicine. Though not as good at vacuum work or engineering, they've done their best to learn how to support internal tasks such as life support, manual labor, networking, electronics, and anything else they can get their hands on. There's been significant pressure from them to leave as soon as possible, though.

The infomorphs recovered from the /Carolina Days/ has been stowed and is kept under lock, at least until there's a consensus on what to do with them.

It's 1.1 AF, and you're slowly running out of large-scale salvage opportunities. The scavengers are now getting serious about claiming things, and you can't really avoid going into either hazardous environments or getting into territorial/claim disputes. Your individual salvage teams, armed with rockets and particle cannons, have already aggressively warned off at least one competing expedition. You're also starting to see an uptick in LLA and Hypercorp patrols. The LLA has started creating more regulated traffic control zones and either pushing refugees out of it, or else confiscating their vessels with drone boarding actions. You're not in such a zone, but these types of operations, common only in extreme situations in the post-Fall chaos, are becoming more common. Worse, perhaps, are the Ultimates who have begun doing so to ships outside LLA's controlled zones.

>wat do?

>>38158664
We should make a policy for those who fly with us without joining our coalition. Maybe that they are under our protection, but only get a partial vote on fleet actions, or that fleet services (construction, maintenance, etc.) are still served as a trade bussiness and not a given service or whatever.

>>38158784
>wat do?

A dark-net cellular group starts to explore opposed social actions to take the Bohr, including morph-knapping or psychosurgery on the Bohr's naval hierarchy of command. This is primarily an exploratory and capacity building exercise done during "down" time. It is intended to present a b-capacity to the general collective during crisis if the Bohr is viewed as necessary for the survival of the community and its transition out of earth orbits towards safety. Nobody involved would like to be given a go mandate, but, they generally view negotiation from a position of weakness as an unacceptable option in survival.

They would much rather an "a" option of cooperative social pressure work.

>>38158664
DO NOT DISPOSE OF SENTIMENTAL OBJECTS!

Especially ANYTHING potentially from Earth! That stuff will be insanely valuable, especially remade into rememberance and nostalgia jewelry. Same goes for any hard currency we have from earth.

For plasma rockets. Set our Fabbers to make a new ship parts fabber. We make more Plasma Rockets directly from that.

Focus on the Plasma Rockets for our friendly ships, anybody who wants to join and leave with us and will contribute to the task of getting to the Belt. They can go where they want afterwards, but unless they sign on for the long haul, they don't have a say in charting the course we take, and only vote on issues directly effecting their own ship.

The moment the ships with us are outfitted to go, and willing to leave with us? Then we ask the Bohrs to join up with us permanently. It's time to go. We've helped everyone we can, and if we stay, then we'll just get seized by the LLA, the Bohrs has to know the LLA, which is now primarily controlled by Lunar Hypercorp Interests (since the last nationally controlled habitat, mostly run by the Indians, was nuked into slag by now from a titan infestation).

We bug out.

Also, we remade the hypdroponics from the Ten Star to be a fuel refinery right?

Anyway. We get the plasma rocket infrastructure made. We make some more CMs if possible to do so without interfering with other things, and we get ready to leave. The Bohrs is invited again to join us formally. We could really use them, and they know our good intentions by now.

The moment we set out by the way? We should declare that we're throwing in with the AA. We're going straight for the Belt, that cluster of C-Type asteroids mentioned earlier. Stopping in Mars or those trojan orbits is a bad idea since the Triads are based in those reasons. Fuck that.

>cont with tl;dr summary.

>>38158784

>wat do?

Alright, it's time to close up shop. We need to get going, for both internal and external reasons.

I propose the following rough plan:
>Gather up our new allied ships in a single location to prepare for an orbit change to the belt
>Establish a rocket shop on the Horn and begin assembly of plasma rockets with the combined force of the convoy
>Begin prototyping and fabrication on Fighters for short-range defense
>Complete a neutrino farcasting rig and contact the Argonauts on Mitre with out scientists to obtain open source blueprints for vital technologies we need for colonization. Definitely use them to check our navigational data
>Plan for an interception to the Martian cylinder Pontes, it has a South American background but is friendly with the outer system
>Once we're prepared for the burn, have the Phoenix with a minimum crew and relatively unladen prep for high speed low drag extraction of any vital tech we lack - either we jump a claim or drop into LEO. Point defense system is required for this.
>Get the fuck out of the orbit before anybody decides we've worn out our welcome

If anybody wants to know why we're leaving, we point outside the window. This sky ain't free anymore.

>>38159098
Never mind >>38159100 has it down. Just throw in extra details about the conditions for joining us permanently or not permanently. Permanently joining the Rebirth Collective gives them a say in charting our course and in how we establish our colony. Joining just for the journey to the belt means we help them out, guard them as allies, then wish them luck when we go our separate ways. They have no say in the path the Convoy will take nor it's end destination, but are welcome amongst us all the same.

Also, if I might suggest, while traveling, we should fab up additional CMs, at least one for every permanent ship in the convoy, and then once they are seen to, one for each allied ship to give them a good start in the Outer System. Same goes for a railgun system on each. No charge expected from them in return, just good will and to remember to trade with us when they set up their own communities later on.

>>38159100
>The sky ain't free

The orbit of earth gotta be litter'd with the corpesicles of fall refugees

>>38158784
Can we get a full set of the blueprints we now have available given the ships that have joined our convoy? Assuming we copied anything they had? I'm hoping that the Bohr's also let us copy their hardware and software in return for help?

>>38159100

Addendum, the Pontes intercept should be optional, but allowed for. It's probably the only friendly port, especially if we declare for the AA, between here and the Belt. It also supposedly has a large spacecraft infrastructure (why the Brazilians originally built it) we can use for possible exchanges and repairs. We might also be able to trade our cash-to-rep there, with our only other possibilities being on Luna itself or Extropia (or some allied freehold). Basically, if at all possible, we want to stop and try and continue to network, but can be prepared to burn right on out if the Planetary Consortium would be inclined to intercept us.

>>38159100
Also, we need to be unafraid of taking some of the ships in our convoy to parts for fabrication. Ships should volunteer for this. Even the Phoenix is an acceptable removal for this purpose, it just means we'll move to the Horn.

This is obviously a last resort only to be done if we find ourselves unable to scavenge anymore. And even then, ONLY those ships that have fully joined the collective, and whose crew has AGREED to this.

Anyway.

CM.

We need a full rundown of all technology, all ships, and our total count of morphs in all states and forms.

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>>38160018

EclipseCM?

Can you answer the question about what our exact resource standing is right now? With the Bohr's included as they're technically with us for the time being.

So let's talk military tactics.

Let's talk about what has been rendered obsolete.

Right at the top of the list is mortality. Now, you can render somebody a casualty, unable to continue their fight, but it's a great deal harder to inflict a fatality.

So Assassination of a major leading figure just got a lot harder. Even if you manage to corrupt their current ego, they can back it up to a relatively new one potentially. If they have multiple backups, even a bit of psychowarfare code set to activate after a set amount of time isn't garunteed to be effective.

So right at the top, it's near impossible to remove a soldier from the theater of warfare permanently. They will only get more experienced and come back in a new body in a total warfare situation. This, combined with advances in medical technology, render just about every single ancient precept of war obsolete right at the get go.

Secondly. Logistics. They're far easier now. Provided you have a source of hydrogen and carbon, plus a power source, it's relatively easy to make almost any form of weapon and even morphs. This renders a great deal of modern precepts of warfare obsolete (not entirely, it's just that much harder to break shit down).

Note: Even information infrastructure is so well made and redundant, and most importantly so unrestricted by bandwidth, that attempting to cut off this flow of information is next to impossible. So you can't even inflict casualties by blowing up the servers that egos are contained on, chances are they can all egocast out if they have even as much as a half-minute of warning.

Early warfare was about inflicting as heavy casualties as possible.

Modern warfare is far more about destroying logistics capability.

So what then, is Transhuman Warfare about?

In my mind, the answer is rendering the enemy unwilling to fight any longer. Memetic warfare has become the order of the day.

>cont.

>>38160827
Not true, I'd argue electronic warfare got more effective. You brick the enemies network, you kill anyone in infomorphic form and you end there respawns, as well as potentially killing soldiers hooked up to it.

>>38160872

Also, in a total war situation, given that this is a situation with limited space and planetary bodies, another way to defeat your enemy is to remove their home ground. It's hard to fight when you've taken destabilized or obliterated their hab. Yeah, theoretically, they can return to that area and they're still alive, but they can run out of bolt holes. It's just most costly than is worth for most groups because then if they want that space, they have to build a new hab or occupy the old one.

>>38160925
Alternatively, you can poison the well so to say, taking advantage of combat sims and the like. You can download a contaminated simulator or pull an NSA and intentionally leave security breaches in any software you put out to the public, which can then be manipulated if it is used against you.

>>38160827
This is because it is almost impossible to render an opponent, on a large scale at least, UNABLE to fight.

There is an exception to this, and it is an important one that has never changed, and I believe never WILL change.

Territory control. Real Estate, physical space and location, are literally the only things that put a limit on warfare beyond the willingness to fight.

It means that to end a battle, you must literally maintain 100% control of the territory that battle is given. Every fabber, every possible point of egress, all of it. And then you must repeat the process, over and over again, until the enemy has no place left to flee.

This obviously, only applies to Transhuman opponents, against opponents who are primarily Zeros? It becomes an order of magnitude easier since the first rule: "Killing somebody doesn't remove them from the pool of experience a power has" is no longer in effect, though the existence of fabbers still makes the logistical issues harder to create and attack.

>>38160872
If you can do so. Such attacks must be consistent, maintained, and backed up. This is one of the cases where defense exceeds offensive capability in most cases. Also light lag.

An established base will have more servers and people to bring to bare in a cyber warfare than any egressing force will be capable of bringing to attack. While Cyberwarfare becomes the mainstay of espionage and covert warfare, in a case of total war, it becomes an opening act, an alpha strike, it would be almost useless except when two enemies meet in the field. Further, you cannot be sure that you will hit their fabricators in a cyber attack if they have some that are off the grid. Defense in cyber security is as easy as just turning off your mesh and moving it to a hardline network with few points of egress, at least in terms of industrial capacity.

>>38160961
The moment you launch an attack physically against an entrenched position, is the moment that cyberwarfare will no longer be effective against that position.

>>38160955
Again. This is talking about when actual battle is engaged. I agree that covert warfare is an important topic, but it is preliminary to the actual battle, and thus, an entirely separate topic I believe. It's what you do BEFORE the battles begin.

>>38160925
>>38160961

Never mind, we got to the real estate clause in the end.

>>38160961
On this note, I've been wondering. In a fire the big source of damage is smoke, in the smoke of most fires is carbonic acid, nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and god knows what other nasty shit, this is magnified among synthetic chemicals in fires. These acidic chemicals will degrade electronics rapidly by causing short circuits and breaking down the circuit boards of devices. After a fire electronics can be intact and functional only to break down within a month, one after another.

How do the electronics in this canononical universe hold up to it? A 0 g fire is nasty enough as is, presumably it would be even worse in this universe where electronics are so highly needed, one bad fire could ruin everything.

The point of limited transhuman warfare is to beat people without access to a full transhuman economic suite with dicks until they're all degraded and poor.

The point of total transhuman warfare is to permanently win the population controlled by the enemy state to your memeplex.

>>38158800
>We should make a policy for those who fly with us without joining our coalition.
This seems like a good idea. Get on it, /tg/ .

>>38159229
>We need a full rundown of all technology, all ships, and our total count of morphs in all states and forms.
All of the ships you're considering is a no, since it would take for fucking ever. Technology is a nebulous category; you have molecular manufacturing, HO and Plasma rockets, railguns, basic robotics, etc. If you're talking about just your ships, your status looks like:

Craft:
Large Lander and Orbital Transfer Vehicle *Phoenix*
>Population Capacity 161/150 (14% Adv. Biomorph, 14% Splicer/Flat, 44% Pod, 28% Synth)
>HO Fuel (77/100)
>Armaments: 1x Dorsal Railgun, Disposable Missile Launchers, Small Arms
>Other Assets: CM, 4x Fabbers, Whipple Shield, Infomorph Servers (144)
>Current Action: Diplomacy with Bohr (Other actions available), Salvage Ops

Large Lander and Orbital Transfer Vehicle (Modified) *Persistence of Visions*
>Population Capacity 172/175 (10% Adv. Biomorph, 56% Splicer/Flat, 19% Pod, 15% Synth)
>H Fuel (27/100)
>Armaments: 1x Dorsal Railgun, Small Arms
>Other Assets: 1x CM, 8x Fabbers
>Current Action: None.

Autonomous Cargo Hauler (Modified) *Horn of Plenty*
>Population Capacity 158/500 ( 2% Adv. Biomorph, 44% Splicer/Flat, 41% Pod, 13% Synth)
>H Fuel (30/100)
>Armaments: Small Arms, Missile Launchers
>Other Assets: Rocket Buggy x 2, Psychosurgery Gear, Medical Supplies, Moonshine Distillery
>Current Action: None

>>38161027
Which reminds me. We need to get a (probably reserve volunteer) fire service operating soon as part of damage control and civil community.

>>38161055
you know, there are such thing as emergency ventilation shafts to space, they tend to stop fires pretty quickly, and fuck up anything even mildly organic in the area. Its good for fires and boarders but REALLY bad if you are connected to a network of this as its an easy target for espionage.

>>38161027

I'd have to check, but most should be housed in some relatively safe materials. Storage in EP is mostly optical and... something else I don't remember. There's a decent section on future materials and such.

However, you'd need to do a pretty extensive fire to cripple the enemies general electronic capability, this is the whole point of using a self-repairing Mesh network, which is the system of choice post fall. Any individual device is a node in the network you can route through.

However, they have this lovely smart compound called "NotWater" which will kill a fire but then it reverts to a non-stick form which should bead off most any surface without causing water damage. It's cheap as hell to make.

>>38161081

Also that.

>>38160995
Yeah, it exists as a method, but it's incredibly costly.

That said, it's also incredibly effective.

I'd argue, that these precepts are EXACTLY why the TITANs won the war during the Fall.

They found ways to make the enemy either unwilling to fight, or would fight for them. They unleashed cyberwarfare on such a scale that it renders the precept that cyberwarfare is ineffective obsolete. If you possess a sufficient cyberwarfare suit, then it is possible to make it function in the middle of a battle. But barring the intervention of SEED AI, I do not believe that two transhuman opponents can conduct cyberwarfare as anything but the opening gambits before an actual battle.

>>38161053
Okay. Firstly. Actions: Pheonix should be doing the scavenger runs, while Vision acts as the primary diplomatic envoy to the Bohr (obviously whoever has been negotiating with the Bohr will move over to do so from the Vision)

The Horn needs to be fabbing plasma rockets for the ships looking to join our fleet, and also helping refugees medicinally since they have that gear.

So here's my big thing? Is the Bohr willing to let us copy the hardware and software of their Healing Vats and Fusion Reactors? They're a goddamn UN ship, that's military spec probably or just under, they're GOING to have both of those things on their vessel. I think at the very least they owe us that much? Even if they're not going to join us permanently?

>>38161053
>This seems like a good idea. Get on it, /tg/ .

Didn't we?

>>38159098
>>38159172

Basically, the TITANs won the war because they had an unstoppable lance and an unbreakable shield in the form of their cyberwarfare. That, more than anything else I'd argue, is why they were able to curb stomp transhumanity.

That, and a complete lack of morality when it came to winning. Their tactics were effective exactly because they were keyed to be things we could not sensibly or ethically counter. Many TITAN tactics can't be reapplied for transhuman warfare for this reason. After all, I don't think any of us agree that brainwashing the population of a habitat is an acceptable course of action except in perhaps the most dire of circumstances.

>>38161182

If you're counting their miracle tech R&D into their cyberwarfare, then yes. TITAN mass subversion of AI and networks is only part of how they killed us. They also had access to vast, theoretically limitless intelligence, which they used to develop advanced combat platforms, self-replicating nanoswarms, deadly nanoplagues and the physical subversion of transhumans via the Exsurgent Virus or the Basilisk Hack. It has nothing to do with morality - transhumans were not and are not capable of the same technological level as the TITANs displayed.

Seed AI top tier.

>inb4 somebody says we should make a Seed AI

>>38161182
The shield was not so much unbreakable as it was blinding to look at.

>>38161240
thought about it. Then said 'fuck that'. If we ever find out Firewall is a thing then we should align with them and give them habitats for their use posing as parts of the collective, but beyond that I'm against any form of making our own SEED AI... it's a good way to get us all nuked from orbit.

Point, but I'd argue that a great deal of that tech advantage was directly derived from their cyberwarfare directives.

Today? We can knock down TITAN exsurgents and similar. Often relatively easily compared to fighting the ones directed by TITANs, and it has little to do with their super intelligence to my mind. There is a certain logic to warfare that exists regardless of your mental level, no matter how alien you are. The control of spatial dimensions and locations for example.

Their cyberwarfare gave them omniscience, and the ability to easily subvert anything thrown against them. Basilisk Hacks are just another form of cyberwarfare. Their physical subversion of humans could be argued to be the same general concept only the information 'hacked' was biological instead of digital.

Exsurgents by themselves are not easy to kill, but it is possible.

We didn't win one conflict against the TITANs, even in the cases when we banded together. Which we are capable of doing against their fairly intelligent exsurgent remnants, which lack the same cyberwarfare capabilities that the TITANs themselves did.

Thus, I argue, that the CRITICAL edge was the cyberwarfare they used. Without that, humanity could have, if united, won even against the overwhelming tech advantage even if we were on fairly equal terms digitally.

>>38161377
we can always try to convince a random morph it is an AI through immoral psychosurgery and psychotorture and use that, it might be slightly better right?

>>38161240
replying to the quoted's spoiler
I've seen this LOILGAOOID Licenced free software floating around called TIMMY in an early alpha…

>>38161524
as hilario- I mean immoral as this might be to do... I think we shouldn't.

File: MarajaCabral.pdf (108 KB, PDF)

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Maraja was lying on the floor in the primary server room on board the Horn of Plenty. In microgravity, if you found a way to rest yourself long enough and shed your momentum, you would just kind of settle into a position, until something else moved you. Maraja liked the server room, it was cool, and the sound of the internal components comforting, oddly nostalgic of her college days. The bulkhead opened, allowing the sterile white light of the outside corridor to spill into the room, slicing through the low emergency lighting and the manual indicator lights like a knife. Or at least that's how it felt to Maraja, who had to squint.

Farid, now in a synth, awkwardly bobbed into the room. He'd stuck pretty close with Maraja since she'd fished his stack back on the 10*. She glowered at him, but he didn't seem to notice. "Hey doc, I got you a present~!" he said, his synthetic voice gaining an odd reverberation as he sing-songed the last word. Maraja (carefully) placed her fingers to her temples in a cheesy psychic gesture she'd seen in many sci-fi vids as a child. "You have brought me a darkcasting setup, a server with psychosurgery tools and an ego bridge" she intoned, mysteriously. Obviously, she had not gained the information through psychic powers, but by monitoring the local mesh. Farid just stared at her, synthetic mouth permanently in a cheery smile, the lenses of his optics audibly focusing - a synths attempt to blink. Maraja blankly stared back at him, subtly off-put by his lack of proper body language. Or maybe that was 20 hours of no sleep and that zone between being drunk and a hangover talking. "What do you want from me Farid, a handjob?" She gave an exasperated gesture, which also caused her to start drifting "vertically" in the chamber. "They want you to take a look at it, and I was the only one who knew to look for you in person here." he replied.

>cont

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>>38161658

Maraja sighed, and pivoted - finally starting to get a handle on this freefall nonsense... maybe. She then pushed off and began drifting to the door. She came to a rest in front of Farid, who started to say "So, Doc, about that-" but Maraja shot out a hand and placed it over his mechanical face. "Farid, I'm going to need you to shut up and do some things for me." Farid remained silent. Maraja took this as invitation to continue. "One, take this-" she handed him the mostly empty plastic bottle of hootch, "and replace it for me. Make sure it wont make me go blind first." He nodded slowly under her hand. "Two, bring that," she tapped the bottle "to the woman who organized that raid, and tell her I want to talk." Farid broke his silence, his voice slightly tinny, "What do you need her for?" Maraja spoke very slowly, enunciating, "She. brought. it. here. I need to speak with her to find out the conditions when she and her people removed them." Farid nodded assent again. Maraja let go of his face, and said "And put on a fucking mask Farid, I can't tell if that face is goofy or creepy. " "I get that a lot." replied Farid, in dead earnest. Then he bobbed away, leaving Maraja floating - nothing but her servers to keep her company.

>>38161377

We could always try to Shackle one. Or build a friendly AI. But we'd or rather he/she/it would run out of processor cycles pretty quick - even with our current plans. It'd also get us thrown out of the AA, branded singularity seekers and probably all shot.

>>38161724
the only safe place to do that sort of thing is on an exoplanet. If we ever find a gate in the belt, then we can try it... but a shackled AI would defeat the point of a SEED AI. Instead we should socialize it to think of itself as Transhuman. Also in 4-5 years, we'll be hearing from the Factors! Anybody else want to try and get a lighthugger from them?

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>>38161850

I'd trust the Factors about as far as I could throw them. Which wouldn't be far, gelatinous buggers.

It's far, but the Pandora or Fissure gates would probably be easy for us to utilize, given our prospective collections. We'd need the capital (social and material) to fund expeditions either via sleeving or to physically boost them other there, but we could begin prospects. Really turn this into SMAC (or we could build a seed ship like Titan will launch in about 9-10 years). In the fiction for Gatecrashing, there's even a system one of the Promethean AIs has taken over to try and build a computronium rig in. We don't have to start that big, but we could find some low-priority worlds for extrnal projects.

Still the massive social consequences, including the branding as dangerous criminals, the permanent deletion or cold storage of our egos. The fact that we could fuck up and hard takeoff and Fall 2.0.

>>38161945
The thing about the Factors is this.

I honestly think they are being perfectly honest in their assertion that avoiding the gates and SEED AI is a good thing, because they recognize them as tools of the Great Filter, they went through the same thing after all.

But I also fully believe that they are trying to establish a galactic monopoly on interstellar travel, trading from other races, making them dependent upon the Factors to interact with other species.

The biggest deal, I think, before doing anything else is finding out WHY the TITANs turned on us. We have to learn about the exsurgent virus and it's origins. The moment we figure it out and get proof of it... that's when shit will get real, because at that is the moment our drive to unite humanity into a single entity will take off.

At that point we go Cannon Weathers (go play Starsiege if you haven't already). We begin the great hunt.

We will not wait and fortify the home system waiting for the axe to fall, we will go out, and behead the headsman himself.

Something above us determined that we should be exterminated. It did it's damnedest to do so. Well now we'll hunt them. We'll find them, and we will undo their presence in this galaxy for the crimes they perpetrated against us and every other species in this galaxy.

It thinks us undone, easy prey for the future. It could not be more wrong. We will destroy it.

>>38162326
>It could not be more wrong.
It could not be more right.

For those looking to kill time with some more singularity event gone wrong lore. Have this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080222175243/http://www.tribesroleplayers.org/index.php?page=ss/scannex/archives

The scannex from Starsiege. It's pretty dated, but it's still pretty awesome. Shows perspectives both from the Human news network as wars break out and then the Cybrids (read: rebel robots) return to exterminate humanity, and then there's also the cybrid side of things.

Have fun!

Okay, so things got a little crazy over here, and I didn't get back from my thing in time. I'm going to add this to the archive; the next installment will probably be Friday. Thanks folks.

>>38163212

Thanks for running

Sweet, now I can sleep

>>38163212
Anybody want to see if we can manage to keep this thread alive until Friday?

So right now our plan is basically to offer to help anybody who wants out of LLA and PC territory a ride and access to our fabbers?

We get everyone ready to go, snag what blue prints we can, then push out. We leave our options open to visit the tin-can orbital run by the south americans but otherwise we make burn for the Main Belt?

Goal is to get blueprints for energy generation, mining, and asteroid colonization in general?

Plan is to salvage what we can as we go, the odd asteroid or comet if there are any on out path, and use those to make CMs for each ship in the fleet? Starting with those that sign on permanently?

We should put in a protocol in all CMs we make to send out a general warning when somebody starts fabbing WMDs and weaponry that can penetrate bulkheads or asteroid colony air locks.

Anyway, we head for that cluster of 10 or so asteroids. Get them set up in a nice orbit around each other so they won't ever impact, then begin setting up mining stations and such?

Something we should consider fabbing just in case.

Boarding Pods... if we end up getting chased by somebody, we need to be able to fuck them up hard, our rail guns will keep most off of us, but we need a serious deterent. Like forks loaded into combat gear and thrown into enemy ships. Cut their way in, disable the engines by any means.

>>38164005
I'm pretty sure just spacefuture explosives will fuck up anything with a shit enough defense grid to allow something large enough to fit several combat morphs in through. Boarding is something you do to an enemy already crippled and unable to resist.

>>38164615
Right, then I guess we need something else to throw anybody off our trail...

I guess we could go with the incredibly effective, and really REALLY irresponsible method of just tossing fucktons of trash out the back...

>>38164728
actually anything that's too fast for us to shoot will probably be able to dodge anything we throw at it.

we're better off with omni directionalLaser pods or misiles or countermeasures.

>>38164921
I was more thinking creating a big old cloud of fuck you behind us if they got too close, but yeah, I see what you mean.

Also, I'm not worried about anyone who can outrun us so much as fuckers who can keep up with us.

>>38164939
So part of this whole debate.

When do we officially declare for the AA?

Right now right before we leave, but not quite when we're ready to go, seems like a bad idea.

Doing it part way through the Journey seems a bad idea as well, especially if we only do so at the point we've run into trouble, seems like a good way to start off with a bad rep with a faction that's already sorta ambivalent about us.

I'd say, provided nothing goes seriously wrong FORCING us to leave. We announce it immediately upon us pulling out of Earth Orbit.

If we get attacked and forced to leave earth orbit early? We don't declare for it until we reach the belt and begin operations to construct a colony, being perfectly honest with our intentions of "We intended to declare the moment we left earth orbit, but how the hell would it have looked us asking to take part in the alliance only after we've been attacked? That'd be pretty dick."

>>38165047
We certainly can't throw all in with them right now. We do that? The LLA and PC ships will swoop in fast and take us. We don't announce it until we are READY to make burn for the Belt.

This is either going to go super smoothly, or it'll result in a grand chance between ourselves and the inner system powers that be.

If we declare for the AA when we make burn though, we should get some more people joining up with us on the way.

Also, anybody want to go pirate hunting along the way? I think that'll be good fun.

>>38165141
We should come up with mythological beast names related to birds for our various initiatives.

Roc, Garuda, Hræsvelgr, Veðrfölnir, Benu, Anzu, Strige/Strix, Cockatrice, Tengu, Thoth, Wakį́yą/Kw-Uhnx-Wa/Binesi/Thunderbird are just a few we can name.

If we come up with a pirate hunter micro-collective though, I say we name them Roc, after the bird from Sinbad's legends.

>>38165244
Military Micro-collective is the Hræsvelgr microcollective. Named after the eagle that stood eternal vigil upon the Yggdrassil's peak.

Hugin and Mugin should be two intelligence gathering microcollectives, they work to police one another as well.

Thoth could be the microcollective dedicated to working closely with the Argonauts, our R&D department. While Tengu would probably be a secret microcollective that we deny actual involvement with, a group of pirates and raiders who disavow connections to us, but seek out threats against the collective and eliminate them.

>>38165244
>>38165326

Birds are important in friends who work.

>>38165369
Well Phoenix is our initial ship name, and we prefer the term Rebirth Collective I think, has turned up in multiple writefaggotries for the setting, but Friends Who Work was just something tacked on as a bunch of suggestions, and then the CM picked it at random.

>>38165412
I'm not going to feed your mesh to devnul just because we disagree. Fuck it,

>>MUSE. AR. MODIFY. INBOUND "Rebirth Collective" SEEMLESS SUBSTITUTE "friends who work." OUTBOUND "friends who work" ON {{list}} SEEMLESS MESH SUBSTITUTE "Rebirth Collective." {{list}} EQUALS {{list}} PLUS most recent conversant. GO DO.

>>38165557
I don't see why we can't work with both names.

Hey guys. Had an idea.

While culturing a full body might be out of the question... would it take nearly as much resources to culture biological brains?

We could make biocore synths? Less chance of brain hacking... not quite sure why they're so damn expensive to buy though, barring simple scarcity...

why shape does a fighter take? Right now I'm imagining an engine ring around a weapon system. With missile pods arranged on the sides of the engine ring.

so basically reading through the rules... as I understand it.

Synths are better at combat, but are easily taken over by brain hacking (for some reason...)

Biomorphs are inferior to Synths physically, but are harder to take over.

Pods are the worst of both worlds usually.

>>38166064

Brains are the most complex part of the morph process. Central nervous is why Pods (who have cyberbrains) take 6 months to grow-build, but a full biomorph takes 3 years on accelerated growth to hit maturity.

>>38166909

Well, according to the books it's the other way around, a weapon ring around the center block - missile tubes in he main body while the weapon pods can fire in any direction from the external ring.

>>38167780

>so basically reading through the rules... as I understand it.

Synths are more durable (because of inherent armor and wound reduction, and higher DR) but vulnerable to Cyberbrain hacking. It's not so much that it's easy (unless you're a TITAN) but that it's possible, which is bad, because you can't hack a biological brain, only their brain smartphone. Higher quality cyberbrain emulation is also expensive and research heavy.

Biomorphs can't be subverted by an outside source short of a TITAN attack or full course of brainwashing/psychosurgery edits. They're more flexible and comfortable to transhumans, but not as physically resistant to damage, and take much longer to build.

Pods suffer from the hacking problems of cyberbrains, and the lack of inherent durability of biomorphs, but are much quicker to build than full bios, yet retain their flexibility. While extant pods are often shitty (and carry a multitude of social baggage), a Pod is the only way to easily build a real chimerical morph - as the cybernetics can isolate or transition from different genetic stock. Like a Novacrab.

>>38165244

Well, since we already have a variety of names, I say we just pick which is most appropriate to the situation. Use of some of the bird names for micro-collectives seems good, but say, for the carrier idea and maybe even for our prospective new habitat, we might want something else, maybe bee or wasp related.

The "Thunderbolt" name for Fighters (which might be a unit designation, not a model designation) was because originally we were planning on launching or attaching them from the "Horn of Plenty". As far as I can tell one of the earliest references to the cornucopia comes from Amalthea, the Greek goddess of plenty, who was a foster-mother to zeus. The infant god broke off one of her horns (she had goat horns for some reason) and it retained the properties of the goddess.

But since naming the unit "Zeus" seemed kind of like overkill, I thought "Thunderbolt" would be better. We could switch that to "Eagle" though, those are associated with Zeus.

>>38165047
>>38165141

Well, if we plan a stopover in Pontes, that's friendly territory. While the PC is growing in strength and probably consolidating on Mars, technically Mars isn't a PC holding - it's controlled by the Tharsis League who is similar to the LLA. Pontes should be an independent, ex-Brasillian national interest who holds strong relations with the outer system. Once we're in that sphere of influence, it'll be hard to just shock and awe us. If we meet with some Autonomist reps to discuss the formality there, and then declare, we'll probably have safe passage as any out of the system. So long as we don't have anything pirated directly from the PC or attempt to distribute open sourced tech to the PC we'll probably be fine.

I say we declare as we leave though, so if the political situation around Mars is bad, we can skip the stopover and make directly for the belt. We can even maybe call in favors to have some support waiting for us on the other end.

hey guys, what if we tried salvaging the earth itself!?

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>>38170577

What a great plan. Hey, why don't we ask the Fractals and the Warbots if they mind?

Aright, I've been thinking about our morph needs. While in general, we probably want to be able to produce any kind of morph in order to give out citizens what they want and also amplify their abilities, that's long term.

We want to get started on being able to make advanced biomorphs (Exalt and variants) because that'll transition many of our people to H+ and be really ideal for specialization. Vacworkers in bouncers, space jockeys in Hibernoids, scientists in Mentons, investigators and therapists in Observers, diplomats in Sylphs, etc. But even if we could start right now, our first batch would take approximately three years to complete. While we might be able to buy or trade some from a friendly port like Extropia, that'll also be costly. So that's a "medium" term plan. Close enough we need to think about it, but far enough it doesn't help us right now.

If possible, on our way to the belt and when we get there, we need to switch production to include some industrial synthmorphs (Arachnoids, Daityas, flexbots if we can manage them) - which I have called as such so our lovely OP can broadly categorize them without too much granularity. We also need to build industrial bots. Not powerful enough for a transhuman to embody, but our infomorph crew can coordinate or remote operate them.

We also need to build industrial pods; new Vacuum Pods, Novacrabs, diggers. If we're going to fab a mining colony, high quality workforce will be important, and Novacrabs are actually pretty useful. If citizens switch out of them, they can be remote operated like Bots.

If possible, we should consider dedicated "security" units. Not maybe full military spec, but assembling some Security Pods (in their Space Marine variants) could be good, as well as constructing some Sphere/Rover synths - which are basically flying balls with cyberbrains inside who have manipulator arms tucked inside, and in the case of a Rover, come standard with weapon mounts.

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Oh man, I just thought of something. We might actually have some zeroes in the crew - Flats or Splicers without basic mesh inserts.

I know we have a cyberdemocracy, but that doesn't mean that everybody automatically has mesh access - we could have public terminals for that. We need to make sure that every citizen is provided with an ecto when they join if they don't have one handy, which refugees might not.

We also need to maybe acquire some standard muse programs and begin distributing them to the public, maybe get in touch with Titan if they can distribute to use that upgrade package that helps the must keep track of voting issues.

>>38172554
Agreed. But I think that any zero should be encouraged to get at least mesh implants at the earliest opportunity you know? If they really do make the decision, personally, to not have them, that's cool, but I think we should try to eliminate that particular underclass in our society.

>>38174609
I am Not sure we have the ability to install cranial computers. Yet.

>>38172554
>>38174609
>>38174682
Zero's don't just not have mesh inserts, they don't have mesh access of any kind, including ectos.

Having said that I think we should be encouraging as many people as possible to accept basic biomods and mesh inserts for public health reasons if nothing else

>>38175000

Right, which was the original point. We've never made any effort to spread mesh access (whatever level of Mesh the convoy has) to everybody. We have at least a few Flats among the population, and it's possible some of the Earth-based Splicers did not have what we now consider standard implants. Since ectos are tiny and cheap, we could probably dedicate a couple of the smaller fabbers to just shit out enough of them to arm the populace. All the better if we can also equip them with Muses.

Once we have our medical bases more firmly covered, we should establish the installation of the basic augmentation: Biomods, Mesh Inserts, Cortical stacks, as available to all citizens - and Medichines too, if we can manage them.

>>38175000
Well as long as the zero isn't a plague risk then I think they should be permitted to go completely flat if they so desire, but heavily encourage them to take up basic mesh inserts, or at the very least we give them some kind of goggle rig that provides the same benefits without being a (relatively) bulky tablet you know?

Here's another important question. What is the age of majority for us? Obviously it's based on ego age and not morph age, like any sane society would measure.

But when does a child become a functioning adult?

Do we make it a concensus based thing? When a child sufficiently displays the maturity to the community that they can opperate without the guidance of their parents then they are considered adults with all the rights in the collective that an adult has? (ability to vote, ability to make their own morphological decisions, full fabber access)

It's actually a very, VERY important question in case we start allowing bioconservatives to join our collective (not that many would likely do so), because at what point do we consider the child autonomous enough to make decisions for themselves?

I think part of the answer is "they must have reached the point where they're undergoing puberty and the mental changes that come with it."

Another part of the answer is the collective's decision on the matter.

Of course, we can just put it at a hard "16" to avoid all the pedophillia questions that are going to arise over "wait, if we declare a 13 year old autonomous and a full adult that raises some really morally gray areas..."

But I think whatever we decide, and important facet is this. If someone is old enough to participate in the cyberdemocracy, to vote, then they are old enough to be autonomous and considered a full adult. No gradations. No "you can vote at 18 but can't drink until 21" bullshit.

>>38175188
what about a range?

13 is the bare minimum, no one can be declared autonomous below an ego age of 13 Terran years. But it comes with some fairly strict requirements for proof that their local collective must vote on to determine if they have achieved that status.

At 16, the requirements are lowered that the collective must vote on.

At 18 the requirements are lowered yet again.

At 25, they are automatically declared autonomous and full members of the collective. If they are mentally deficient in some manner, then a vote is held on whether they should undergo psychosurgury or biomodding to make them functioning adults if their parents have not already opted for them to do so.

>>38175188

>Well as long as the zero isn't a plague risk then I think they should be permitted to go completely flat if they so desire, but heavily encourage them to take up basic mesh inserts, or at the very least we give them some kind of goggle rig that provides the same benefits without being a (relatively) bulky tablet you know?

A flat without biomods is only a thread to other flats without biomods. Anything that can actually beat biomods would require some serious engineering - so it's already a problem.

If they don't want internal inserts, we can set them up with an ecto (which are by default the size of a credit card but has a fairly malleable form, most people can wear them as jewelry) and they can be paired with AR glasses so you can have AR functions.

>>38175283
>>38175188

The spectrum seems appropriate. Titan has a similar system, it's 25 unless you prove yourself to be of a certain level of responsibility. And the most bioconservative polity in the system (Jovian Republic) does conscription at 15 - though that's a couple years before you're out and have full citizenship. We probably have some underclass "kids" in their early teens who have seen more shit than most of our 30-40 something academics. I agree that majority is majority. If you can vote, you're exercising your full autonomy.

The pedophilia question also gets weird anyway when you can have neotenic morphs

>>38170854
Dealing with this issue.

Here's my thoughts on the matter. We should build up our @-Rep in a few ways.

We have two avenues open to us, given our fairly experienced military population.

We want to raise our @-Rep as soon as possible. Which is why we're going to announce throwing in with the AA once we're ready to leave, but just before we actually do (to give anybody who wants a tow and refits on the way to join up with us).

We should stop in at Extropia or another Anarcho-Capitalist station to cash in our valuable credits for @-Rep to get us started.

Then we have Five things to offer anybody who gives us materials we can't get our selves, and blueprints that aren't open source.

>1) We have an experienced military unit right now. We can probably hammer quite a few smaller pirate and criminal gangs. Our G-Rep will plummet, but who cares? Our @-Rep will soar for dealing with pirates in the belt.
>2) We can offer our fabrication services to any nearby claves and then ship things from us. Many @ claves are going to be lacking in our raw production capacity and while their economies are full new economy, they still need help doing stuff. How many claves would give us massive up-votes and blueprints and even materials in exchange for a copy of our CMs?
3) We can offer future mining produce from us. Export our surplus to other @ Claves. Mostly free of charge obviously, just ask them to refuel us for our return trip and to give us support later on.
4) We can act as a link in the ego-slavery underground railroad. Especially if we build up a massive @-Rep focused communication's rig, like that one in jupiter orbit that's run by the hypercorps. We can potentially help egos escape from slavery from the hypercorps and other groups and get them to the claves they want to live in even if they don't want to live with us.
>cont with final and most important.

>>38175283
A range of ages, and a range of autonomy, and a range of reciprocal autonomies.

16 year olds can't offer socially meaningful work to 16 or 13 year olds unless both are under 25 year old supervision. 16 year olds can offer socially meaningful work to 18 year olds and 25 year olds. (Hell, 0 year olds can offer socially meaningful work to 25 year olds: 25 year olds are great at refusing).

Of course 25 year olds don't have absolute autonomy either. When 25 year olds "beg forgiveness" the standards of community discussion are much more intense.

>>38175621

5) We have goddamn ship part fabbers. Do you know how fucking rare that is? Do you have any fucking clue? Those are NOT at all common and this is THE big bargaining ticket we have. Scum Fleets will FLOCK to us with trade goods, amazing quality workers and skilled artisans, and all kinds of fucking good things (provided we keep our fabbers under lock and key and the big anti-ship guns visible at all times in a totally-non-threatening way so they don't try to run off with our shit) just so we'll repair their shit.

We have, right from the get go, the ability to set up a motherfucking SHIP YARD people. That's something almost no one else has.


>>38175560
No it doesn't get weird when you consider Neotenic morphs. There are quite a few genetic diseases that leave a body looking immature even today. The law focuses on actual age. How you look doesn't matter. What matters is your ego age. You want to run around in a neotenic? That's your business, and if that means you creep out other collective members? Then it's your fallout to deal with.

I have no clue about this setting, but this thing seems interesting. someone give me a quick rundown on what stuff is other than the things explained here before.

>>38175690
The year is 2140-ish. Humanity has reached the singularity, and it fucked us over.

We now have the ability to digitally upload and download consciousness, to create items on the molecular level up (cornucopia machines and molecular fabrication devices).

There is an ideological war forming, between the Old Controlled Industrial Economy where the powers that be have control over devices that would create a post scarcity society (mostly located in the inner system, sunward of the asteroid belt), and the Anarchist Alliance dominated "New Economy" Outer System, where post scarcity really is a thing, limited only by the fact the Outer System has fewer resources than the inner system to make it truly post scarcity.

>>38175690
>I have no clue about this setting, but this thing seems interesting. someone give me a quick rundown on what stuff is other than the things explained here before.

Everybody is dead. In space. But they got better. Earth is proper dead. You kill people who disagree with your ontology, epistemology or politics. But not proper dead, they get better. There are three economies:

a post-capitalist communist economy amongst communist elites: free-market liberals, white collar intellectuals, Swedish People, hardcore fuckers, martian biker gangs
a post-capitalist economy amongst post-capitalist elites: hypercorp zektivs, fuckers-for-hire, celebtards
a capitalist economy for schmos: white collar proles working short term casual contracts, slaves without bodies (bodies without organs).

The primary method of game play is that people debate post-modern and communist theory until something horrible happens and they all die. Sometimes even proper dead.

>>38175690
Oh yeah, and if you find a magic box that suggests you open it, why don't you open it!

>>38175668
>>38175621

Good, solid points. This is actually why I recommended Pontes in the first place, it should have associations with Extropian and Titanian corps and is known to do rep-for-cash trades. It'll give us an opportunity to directly network with groups before we're out to the belt, too, so we don't have to park next to a space rock and then go "okay, so, who can help us with this?"

One thing I will say concerning cash-to-rep, is that unlike other Anarchists I don't think the collective as a whole should disdain money. We're going to be in the belt. There will be Extropian clades, Brinkers and other Independants, and hypercorps (Not just from the PC, but from the LLA, Extropia and other non-associates, and eventually the Morningstar Constellation) out there. While we can operate purely based on the reps of some individuals, we shouldn't shy from willing barter or payment that others give, that's all resources we can use. We might even consider contracting some of Extropia's mutualists and establish our own cred/rep banking system. Other Autonomists might use us to give them cash they need in the Inner System as a favor.

Also, while ship-building capacity is very important, don't oversell it. Every major planetary body has at least one large-scale shipyard facility, Luna/Orbit, Mars and Jupiter should have several. We can offer a valuable service, especially in the Belt, but we're not going to replace the leaders in a major system industry any time soon.

>>38175690

Your mind is software. Program it.
Your body is a shell. Change it.
Death is a disease. Cure it.
Extinction is approaching. Fight it.

>>38175874
Ehn, my thing is that I want us to eventually wipe out the extropians and all of the transitional and old economies... they are necessarily antithetical to our personal policies.

>>38175874
>Also, while ship-building capacity is very important, don't oversell it. Every major planetary body has at least one large-scale shipyard facility, Luna/Orbit, Mars and Jupiter should have several. We can offer a valuable service, especially in the Belt, but we're not going to replace the leaders in a major system industry any time soon.
Actually I'm not arguing we can even begin to compete with our planetary competitors. But advanced shipyards are something lacking even in Extropia. Don't you think the scum would like having a clave on the halfway point between inner and outer systems to stop in at and repair and refuel and all that good stuff?

>>38175913
I can see merit in us setting up good relations with SOME of the anarcho-capitalists... and we can always be part of the debt-trade thing by buying indentured servant contracts.

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>>38175690

Here, have a list of terms.

>>38175987

See, this is the kind of alternative thinking we need.

Most Anarchists would go "Debt trading and ego-slavery? Fascist." we can go "Hey, lets dump some of that money we have we use for nothing else, pull somebody we want out of debt and ask if they'd like to stick around for a while".

>>38176113
And if they don't, we send them on their way.

Plus, for smaller habitats that refuse to trade indentured servants or let us buy out their contracts, we go for the military option, justifying it to the rest of the AA that "look. If they were serious about letting this person out of debt slavery? They'd be willing to sell the contract. Obviously if they are not willing to sell the contract to someone else, then how can we be certain they will honor the contract and let the indentured servant go when the contract is up instead of finding a loop hole to keep them enslaved?"

Nice one two punch.

We work with extropians who are serious about honoring their contracts, and the ones who give signs of being jackasses who try to keep people in permanent debt slavery get wrecked.

>>38146545
man, just popped in here to say: i never expected to see that art outside the novel on my shelf.

Good taste, anon, good taste.

>>38176186
And obviously it's all a free choice on their part.

We aren't FORCING them to sign over the contracts. We just make it clear that someone who isn't willing to negotiate for a contract, or who sets the price on the contract far beyond what is reasonable, obviously has shown their true colors (eg: a fucking hypercorp fascist) and we will respond in kind to enforce the -spirit- of their contract.

Totally their choice, their responsibility to accept. No one is forcing them to do anything.

What's important to remember is that we must NEVER say "accept our price or we come in guns blazing". No no no no. That'd be COERCION. Can't have that. It's only when they refuse to NEGOTIATE at all. If they set an absurdly high price and won't haggle or if they refuse to sell at all.

Obviously in such cases, they don't have any intention of actually releasing the debt slave once the debt is paid, but instead have some intention of trying to keep onto them as long as possible.

We'll take a hit to our @-Rep, but probably not much considering that 3/4ths of the AA don't like the extropians are don't care about them at all, so even when we take downvotes from other extropians, other AA people will upvote us.

>>38176586
Probably we should also look into the history of the person we're negotiating with. If they have a long LONG history of holding to their contracts and not forcing people into perpetual debt slavery, then obviously we can let it slide. Personal dislike is no reason. Those who have a history of keeping people in debt slavery though will get the ultimatum if they don't play ball. Then the Reavers show up.

>>38176586

From a strategic point, we'd also want to pay attention to who we shoot. Security contractors will only go so far, but there are some corps/packages which will basically go to war on behalf of their employers. We'd also have to deal with lots of tort claims for damaged property - we can solve that with an army of legal AGI.

>"Why yes, this armed drone is empowered to act as my attorney. And so is that one, and that one, and that one..."

And I say this because personal disagreements and ideological fervor does not automatically discount any sapient's rights to agency or justice. Anarchists still dole out restorative justice, we can pay some people back for small personal damages.

>>38176716
Obviously we repay any and all collatoral damage dealt in such autonamy claiming missions.

Except to the person who refused to deal. They obviously voided their right to restitution when they renegaded on their contract.

Also anybody who is setting up contracts that are effectively eternal needs to be put down. Full Stop. That shit is slavery.

>>38176716

And actually, the concept of debt indenture as a legal option isn't exactly wholly unlike some things the "punishments" other autonomists dole out - repayment of goods or favors/services to the damaged party. We're more discussing elements who abuse the spirit of autonomy.

>>38176815

Well, I wouldn't hold it as a hard and fast rule - after all we may be able to control the engagement and force involved, and if we're causing collateral our rate of force can also be excessive. But in general no - it would have to depend on the restitution sought. We won't say "we're sorry" or pay "emotional damages" or anything like that, but we might be able to cover the medical cost for a blown-out kneecap if - strictly speaking - the damage to said kneecap was unnecessary to our overall mission goal. This at least, we don't have to worry about with security contractors, they're paid to get shot at. Losing a kneecap would mean hazard pay.

>>38177019
>Well, I wouldn't hold it as a hard and fast rule - after all we may be able to control the engagement and force involved, and if we're causing collateral our rate of force can also be excessive. But in general no - it would have to depend on the restitution sought. We won't say "we're sorry" or pay "emotional damages" or anything like that, but we might be able to cover the medical cost for a blown-out kneecap if - strictly speaking - the damage to said kneecap was unnecessary to our overall mission goal. This at least, we don't have to worry about with security contractors, they're paid to get shot at. Losing a kneecap would mean hazard pay.
Ehn, my reasoning for it is that it sends a clear message to those who abuse the spirit of autonomy in such situations. Don't come crying to us because you tried to game the system, got called on it, and then proceeded to lose your expensive morph.

Obviously we'd not go in, shoot the place up, and leave, it'd be the whole dedicated insertion/extraction deal (by the way, we should continue to focus on that sort of thing, it's one of the hardest to pull off mission types, and if we become known as specialists in it, then we can earn some good rep through merc work that way).

It means we go in, extract the guy, and get them out, as well as extracting any enslaved backups or forks the fucker might have on hand.

Then we pull out, leaving the guy with no indentured servants, and if he got messed up because he got in our way? That's his problem.

Now if we just shot him because he's a dick while he was cowering in his office that's an entirely different matter.

>>38177242
>Now if we just shot him because he's a dick while he was cowering in his office that's an entirely different matter.

Also if we shot him /in/ the dick. That's non-vital area. Completely unnecessary.

>>38157498
>The only real limit is that they would experience a much higher attrition rate in the sense of permadeath.

They don't though, as the Jovians back up combat troops pretty frequently and often do use cortical stacks. (Rimward pg 44) All of their anti-transhuman memes get overridden by survivalist ones very quickly in intelligence and military circles. There are after all, internal rumors that the Jovian Fleet is using infomorphs and AI a fair amount. (which means they totally are if people in the Junta suspect it) It's easy to forget that the Jovian's leadership is very pragmatic, they just have a ideologically motivated population.

>>38157301
Zeros are for the plebs. Mil-spec stuff for the Republic is top of the line by anyone's standards. They just keep it in secure facilities away from the general populace, both the protect them from infowar attacks and to keep them down.

Attacking the Junta is a terrible idea, they're the military giant of the system, and that isn't just legacy tech.

>>38160827
Look at the faction which has, painfully enough, gotten really good at it: The TITANs. You need to wage a war so complete that not even the nano machines are left, install your own weaponized ecosystems (biological, mechanical, or both) You must destroy everything they have, and use the left over raw materials to make what you want. A hab cannot be taken from an armed defender, it will be brutal scorched earth defense followed by the destruction of the hab when they cannot hold out another moment. Either strike so hard and fast there is no time for defense, or destroy everything.

I don't think we want to wage that kind of war, so unconventional methods like memetic warfare and culture wars, infiltrators, agents provocateur and attempts to internally destabilize the opponent are the way to take things (egos, land, habs, resources) intact. I mean, isn't it awful convenient that everyone was already fighting when the TITANs decided to go loud?

>>38177931
>I don't think we want to wage that kind of war, so unconventional methods like memetic warfare and culture wars, infiltrators, agents provocateur and attempts to internally destabilize the opponent are the way to take things (egos, land, habs, resources) intact. I mean, isn't it awful convenient that everyone was already fighting when the TITANs decided to go loud?
Gotta agree. But I think some level of conventional warfare will be necessary if we wish to unite the system.

Full blown memetic warfare, brain washing and such, is just as bad as what the TITANs were doing in it's way.

>>38161027
EP computers are mostly optical or mechanical (nanoscale push-rod designs) so little short of crazing the synthetic diamond they're made of will pause them. (very high temperatures, high energy beams etc) Nothing besides the heat of a bad fire should bother a computer though. NotWater is cheap as a good fire suppressant as well.

>>38164615
Hit a ship with a railgun and it's basically dead. Either the shell smashes it's way through the whole things and kills it, or splinters into pieces and becomes rapidly expanding plasma. Rail Guns are already a very serious short range deterrent. A really good sensor pod/fire control computer would go a long way, as would a really high energy laser, but we only have a ~200 MW power plant, so weaponized lasers aren't something we can use for anything besides close range defense.

>>38167780
Biomorphs also heal on their own time without medichines, but those aren't terribly hard to get.

>>38170577
It's a great place for salvage, except for all the orphaned TITAN war machines down there, and the intensely powerful interdiction grid installed after the fall.

>>38178671
>It's a great place for salvage, except for all the orphaned TITAN war machines down there, and the intensely powerful interdiction grid installed after the fall.
Yeah, only safe route is the Kilimanjaro station link. Everything else is fucked by the interdiction grid.

When we return, we'll totally be rebuilding that thing and making it work again. RECLAIMING EARTH FROM THE CRADLE OF HUMANITY'S EVOLUTION!

>>38178729

Well, technically, in about 9 years the Reclaimers will be good enough at running the cordon to start establishing permanent bases and recovery operations on the surface, but that's taking years of analysis and prep - and massive amounts of funding pouring into the movement from all corners.

>>38178926
So let's talk long term goals of who we want to curry good relations with?

Top of this list:
-Argonauts (we'll be making lots of stuff open source after all I assume except for the things that MUST remain secrets for us. For example if we ever figure out a way to make super-cheap quantum entanglement units)
-Autonomist Alliance obviously, this is as easy as just being bros to most of the members of the alliance and not overtly gunning for anybody else.
-Firewall, assuming we ever become aware of their existence. They could use some serious allies even with their decentralized nature, and if we expand through the belt well enough? We can be those allies.
-The Reclaimers, who will help us bring Rebirth to Earth.

Our focuses of study, I argue, need to be in two zones.

1) We need to focus our efforts on refining material sciences to the point where fabrication of biological bodies by a fabber is actually possible. Mastery of material sciences will also give us the ability to fight the Titan swarms and such.
2) Communications sciences. Especially in the are of Ansible. If we can unlock Ansible, through quantum entanglement perhaps (something we're already getting close to doing today with quantum teleportation), and then refining it to the point where we can expand our mesh across the entirety of our habitats, regardless of size, we can get enormous amounts of sway that way. Especially if we can refine it to the point that it can take the place of emergency farcasters. Even more so if we can figure out how to 'switch' the entanglement between multiple 'frequencies'.

>continue with hardest focus.

>>38179205

Finally. We need to adapt some form of method of data usage that the exsurgent virus hasn't yet learned to adapt to yet. Something completely disconnected from the coding systems that we use today... kept separate entirely from other meshworks so that only physically typing in keys can transfer things... if we do that, we can make our entire habitats secure from pretty much EVERY form of cyber attack.

That said, this would be the most difficult thing to do. We'd probably have to have some of the collective go full benign exhuman to achieve it.

>>38179205

FTL QE comms exit in EP already. However, Qubits needed to transmit between them are limited and highly expensive. You almost always limit it to text, because even the high capacity versions give you a few days of high-quality browsing for they can be replenished, which is an expensive and complex process.

>>38179227

Depending on which interpretation of the metaplot OP is using, countering the exsurgent virus could require outsmarting the ETI - who as a concept are almost always a post-singularity level intelligence. Since they've been around at least a million years - and easily longer - outsmarting them is going to above our conventional means for a long time

>>38180037
The virus adapts to the host.
The host adapts to the virus.

First contact plagues normally look far more horrifying than they really are: we are a green fields infection. And, it may in fact be an inoculation against a different, but related, virus. An inoculating virus hitting a green field still is ugly.

We'll be fine, as long as we remain us.

>>38180114
>>38180037
We get it, viruses are bad, and we should avoid getting them.

>>38180037
We know that the exsurgent virus is developed first to interact with any SEED AI that encounters it. It's highly adaptable, but before ti can actually ACTIVATE it has to be found, and it is only capable of being found by a singularity level intellect.

To then go down the chain and infect those BELOW that level, it has to be adapted BY these intellects to interface with the new systems. Once done, it will be adaptable as fuck.

But what if we invent a code method completely outside of the experience of the TITANs? Something that they never developed or encountered. Something completely alien to both the TITANs, and any other race that the ETI's exsurgent virus has encountered? If we manage that, then it should mean that, on a code base at least, the exsurgent virus will be useless.

We'd still be vulnerable to basilisk hacks and the biological form of the exsurgent virus, but the digital form, provided we divert from it enough and NEVER touch the thing that infected the SEED AI (which I'm willing to bet functioned on the same level as a basilisk hack) we should be immune to the digital forms of the TITAN virus.

To make it certain though, it'd have to be completely incompatible with any other mesh software to date, and we'd have to avoid making any interface type devices for it beyond physically transferring data by typing it into the system by studying the screen with the actual data on it.

>>38180127
>>38180482

The Exsurgent Virus killed the Belt-Builders, and they were capable of at least minor macroscale building in the form of giant habitation belts. And were interstellar. And they're super dead now. They were also way more reliant on AI system than ours, but still - their technology is not quite comparable to our own AI/AGI systems, but slightly different.

And whoever built Giza's black boxes was even older

Of course, we know none of this yet. It'll be years before first contact with the Factors, and the discovery of the Pandora gate, along with rather unpleasant news that so-far, 99% of our cosmic neighbors are long dead.

So guys, I've been thinking, what if, and I'm saying what if, we decided to construct an insectoid shaped capital ship with a very high power laser array. TITAN based coding that zombified people inside of it, and a very edgy AI infomorph hybrid to control it? We could call them something equally edgy like ""reapers"" or something, think it'd work guys?

>>38181381
Reaper's a name already taken. Otherwise I'd say we do this just for the lulz.

I just want to know if the Bohrs Kerr us copy parts from their ship... Such as a fusion reactor for example

question? We want to put a cm in every habitat and ship right? What restrictions? Do we just have the system flag everyone on the ship if the fabber is used to create highly dangerous materials? Is there a log kept of what's made and who made it?

What level of surveillance will we go with? Personally I argue that every room in the habitat has full surveillance, but in privately owned areas, the user is very clearly notified of what is there, and given the ability to control the surveillance for everything that's not basically fire, atmo, radiological, toxin, etc. alarms. Anything that records what's actually going on can be disabled. Everything else is just binary yes no alarms about hazardous substances or conditions, and those can't be disabled at all. Otherwise, in all public areas, constant surveillance in all manners reasonable.

All surveillance data can be accessed at any time by any collective citizen. Who accessed what and when is also recorded. Private home owners who have enabled the no mandatory safety surveillance gear are able to flag that data as inaccessible to certain people, or only accessible to certain people, and such data cannot be accessed by anyone else without a supermajority collective vote.

Obviously private home data is not recorded at all if nonmandatory systems are disabled.

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>>38163324
So, holy shit, this thing is still around? I mean it's not going to make it to Friday, but, uh, thanks for trying?

>>38161658
>>38161688
Nice.

>>38165574
I've assumed that both names sort of stuck, possibly in different languages. 'Friends Who Work' in Chinese or Esperanto, "Rebirth Collective" in English, etc.

Some other miscellaneous things that have been said and been thrown around.
>on "ego death".
There is no such thing as "ego death", but long term habitation in a morph not really designed for human use can cause psychological damage and stress. It's not irreversible, but it is very unpleasant and can lead to social problems.

>CMs and their value
Your cornucopia machines are very valuable, don't get me wrong - but they're not a superpower. More developed powers, including the AA, have a lot of them. It's just that the demand vastly outstrips the current supply due to the masses of struggling refugees.

>exsurgents, ETIs, and other GM-section stuff.
<--------------------- spoiler ---------------------->

>getting data from the Bohr
Some of the problem is software that you can just download, some of the problem is software that you can't download - things that are locked under military encryption or highsec corporate DRM - and some of the problem is expertise. But, yes, you could build a fusion reactor or rocket over the course of a month or two, maybe a bit faster if you had help from more techs.

While I'm enjoying the 'transhuman space warfare' stuff, and some of this will be relevant in your future, I'm noticing a lack of discussion on the concrete, near term arrangements for military, security, law, order, surveillance, etc.

You're going to hit over 500 the next update or two. You've gone past what Dunbar can support there. You're also getting big enough that you can expect visitors on a semi-regular basis, so you're going to want something like a policy on people egocasting to you or docking with the fleet.

>>38182868

We've previously be big on transparency. The CM (which, BTW, isn't big enough on it's own to supply an entire hab, it's like the size of a sofa) has a spime in it, so it should have a mesh-accessible public log which displays who authorized what fab producton. I assume like most AA habs, we'll have a lengthy queue which we'll need to regulate, so most production efforts and requests will be logged by the machine with the person who authorized it. While not often explicitly verboten, most habs to not approve of building a WMD, and if the collective or local sub-unit votes to remove certain selections from the public fabs, that's their business.

In general, we should have no surveillance, but all sousveillance. All meshed systems are effectively sensors and they're effectively public. We don't need to build HD visual cameras into your bedroom (though after cramped space living for over a year, I suspect our populace has reduced their nudity taboos a little. You can only hide so much in space) but in general, the collective knows where you are and what you're doing at any given time. This is so no one person hoards this information, it's just open access. I'm sure our infomorphs will love that shit. Also, if we're planning on transitioning fully to the Rep Economy, we'll need to have the rep system track anything you do which involves your interaction with people to maintain rep score and social networking history. We probably want a real mesh node first, not a a kitbash with BBS/IRC systems only on wi-fi.

>>38183084
Why not just worry about external surveilance, basic alarm systems for movement in places there shouldn't be movement, for an abnormal energy spike nearby, for radiation readings, for radio readings, for light readings, and for a bunch of other stuff, you'll get a bunch of false positives and it wont tell you what it sees, but it'll make for a cheap, mass producable observation system that literally only works through sending small enough data sets that hacking it can't take down your entire sensor system, especially since its reading in true false coding. So a DDOS attack would literally be an early warning from it.

>>38182926

Ah, foreign policy.

Well, for now, we can't accept any egocasts from any who isn't willing to instance as an infomorph - unless they've somehow made arrangements ahead. We've got to many infugee members who should be in the morph queue to bump them down for random visitors. Eventually we'll be able to offer temporary or permanent "housing" from the stock, but that is not this day.

Physical visitation should be done with what I assume would be fairly standard protocols for post-apocalyptic refugees in risky situations. Anybody who comes close gets painted with as high a resolution RADAR/LIDAR we have (to check threat profile), has their IFF checked and if they haven't hailed us already, they get the "state your business call". If we don't like what they say, we put a railgun round or a rocket as close to the prow of their ship as humanly possible and say "this is your first and only warning".

When we dock, we give them a standard customs check (T-rays, nanodetectors, etc) to make sure they aren't trying to smuggle a TITAN nanoswarm can or a tactical nuke into the hold, and let them pass. HEAP seekers and railgun snipers are probably not allowed inside a pressure hold but otherwise we hold to principles of self defense. Any specifics anybody wants to add?

>>38183238

That works for personal-yet-public systems, like in a private quarters, but if an area is public access in the ship, we should rig it with the full spime setup. One its the main way our infomorph members observe the world, and two, it's already public. Majority of our members have cyberbrains anyway, so they literally save everything they experience in XP format, and can broadcast this on the mesh. Static emplacements aren't uncommon in that respect. Of course, this all depends on the situation, some ships in a convoy might not be able to do this, but most of them should have internal sensor data to use.

And in the case of hacking, you already can't drop the entire sensor system, there's no closed network. Self-repairing mesh networks. Every device is a node in the network, you can only completely shut down the network by going around and hacking every individual spime device, or inhibiting the entire area's wireless capability. And if people are going around with radio jammers or throwing EMP grenades, somebody will notice.

>>38182926
Thanks for the heads up. We'll have to think on this stuff.

>rules on security
See the surveillance stuff >>38182868
I argue we set up AI that inform everyone when an antisocial action like violence or theft is taken up, and informs everyone within striking distance who can respond. Anybody can carry a weapon on our vessels provided it can't pierce a bulkhead or other necessary air containment area.

Certain people who agree to always respond to such emergencies are given specialized nonlethal weaponry, since we want the morphs intact.

>ego casting
Anybody ego casting in goes through a specific network. Their data is checked for viruses and such before it's allowed on our general fleet mesh. Only citizens by pass this. One cannot become a citizen without going through this process or coming into the ship with a morph.

>docking procedures
Docking procedures are simple. You come over on a rocket sled. We detect any wmds we shoot to kill without warning and send our record of the wmd signal to the mothership to let them know why we did it simultaneously with the shot being fired. We don't allow ships larger than any of ours to directly with the ship. We expect other ships to keep their guns trained away from ours and we'll provide the same courtesy, only exception is for rocket sleds and similar.

>>38183478

>I argue we set up AI that inform everyone when an antisocial action like violence or theft is taken up, and informs everyone within striking distance who can respond. Anybody can carry a weapon on our vessels provided it can't pierce a bulkhead or other necessary air containment area.

It's called a Muse, we should have every citizen with a meshed device have one.

If you meant a static AI, there's no way in hell we can engineer a weak AI to monitor every sensor feed simultaneously and run some kind of heuristic algorithm to recognize what a crime in progress looks like. That's something you have teams of Infomorphs and AGIs do.

>>38183465
I'm cool with this, but I still think putting in the option, with owners of private quarters being able to physically disconnect the nonmandatory sensors from the mesh. As in the surveillance device is separate from the mesh node linking it into the local mesh. You are told specifically where it exists and how to deactivate it. You pull the wire, no hacking from the mesh can turn on the nonmandatory surveillance (eg:cameras, no emergency detection gear)

>>38183478
>>38183602
Please no, I've read The Circle and I know how this shit always ends, with a dictatorship of whoever is best at manipulating people to there cause.

>>38183602
Then we have teams of infomorohs and AGI do it.

>>38183682
Hue and cry results in dictatorship.
1700 years of common law.
The more you know.

>>38183682
How the hell will it result in that? This system functions on almost every collectivist habitat.

>>38183712
Extrapolate

>>38183744
Being able to define anything as a social norm and pressure people into voting yes for it by "if you disagree you aren't normal" or whatever, can only lead to bad things. But eh, the worlds already gone to hell over shit so this can't go that badly.

>>38183777
That would work, except being part of the AA means you're constantly exposed to legions of people who hold both the same and differing opinions from you, the only uniting factor being that everyone agrees that the freedom to choose how you live (provided you aren't preventing somebody else from doing the same) is sacrosanct. Peer pressure is a lot harder to bring to bear when there is no limit of information and you're free to go at any time, hell... We let people leave with their morphs even.

>>38183691

Now that, we can do. That's basically how sousveillance works, all your surveillance is public access and anybody can view any given sensor at any given time, and the records. Typically there is a decent chunk of your population (especially infomorphs with time to kill and processor cycles to spare) who dedicate themselves to watching the sensor feeds constantly. Give everybody wi-fi in their brain and it makes a decent system. Mesh inserts includes biomed sensors so if you suffer an injury/internal damage, your system can automatically dial space-911. Building a centralized point just gives the system failure points and more chance for abuse. You can't wield something against the populace as easily if they also can wield it.

Combine with >>38183664 in private spaces - VPN or physical controls to limit spimes when you want to be alone (if you do at all, some people lifelog/XPcast LITERALLY their entire life 24/7) with the explicit warning that your personal safety can be endangered by doing so. If you consent to the increased risk, the fuck can we stop you?

>>38183777

Welcome to post-apocalyptic anarchocollectivism. If you're antisocial and uncooperative, your extraneous wants and desires are literally worth less. The only thing that keeps it from being a mob rule is that mob rule is being antisocial, uncooperative and most important - uncool. REPUTATION ECONOMICS

>>38183772
Since the 500s amongst common people in England, the concept of a "hue and cry" has existed. These are local societies where everyone knows and watches everyone. When someone sees someone doing something fucked, they raise a hue and cry, they yell for help. Help comes. The community fucks someone up.

It works.

Strange enough to say, the common law society of England has had fewer despots than usual, and the local dictators, the squires, were enforced on the common people by military supremacy.

Ordinary people managed their own justice in England for 1700 years. Then TITANs.

We are local societies where everyone knows and watches everyone. What we should do is when someone sees someone doing something fucked, they raise a hue and cry, they yell for help. Help comes. The community fucks someone up.

>>38183864
If we were limiting information then yeah... But one thing I know we have to keep secret is WHAT you voted for. Everyone knows how much your vote is worth, but the one but of information we never record is who voted for what, not even who abstained from the vote, just the tolled numbers for each vote (yay, nay, abstain)

>>38183971
True, although this DOES leave an opening for fraud, but we should be able to confirm any weird percentages. It'd help if we had some form of a survey.

>>38183925
I say you can't disable the spimes connected to gear recording things that are potential hazard to the entire station, atmosphere reading, toxin reports, radiological and Fire alarms. Pressure sensors. Those are the only things that are always on in every room, because we want to know if s somebody's heroine lab just caught fire and is burning up precious oxygen,

>>38184038
>manual heroin
FUCKS SAKE ERIC, we have a CM.

>>38184010

We have an AI managing the votes, the system should be robust enough to handle statistical error detection.

Though, most actual Autonomist habs are full transparent. Your voting history would be known to everyone, and an element of your social networking and reputation. It's hard to hold it against anyone because there is no "government" to hold it against you, and you know everything about any individual or small group who tries to hold it against you. We're going to run into this a lot working with the AA.

>>38184038

Fair play. Environmental sensors probably need to stay active, if only because we'd probably eventually have automated safety systems which need to kick in.

We should also, y'know, probably keep tabs on anybody making a secret drug lab anyway, so there's no fumes or anything leaking anywhere. But seriously, we have better drugs for that now. Even the synths can take drugs.

The only thing people really grow is orbital hash.

>>38184010
This is true, but vote fraud becomes impossible because one metric we can take is WHO voted period. It's a mandatory part of our collective. You have to VOTE abstain to abstain from the vote. You don't just not show up or not vote. Nonparticipation in the collective isn't allowed because we never want to have a circumstance where someone can argue 'the silent majority' for their case. Also it mKes voting fraud next to impossible since the system registers who voted, and what for, the wipes the record linking who voted for what, but keeps a record of who voted, and the total votes for yay, nay, and abstain.

But odd votes can be recalled after a thorough check of the system. And I think we should have the very highest penalty for attempting to rig the vote. Permadeath. Rigging the vote by bribery, memetic virus, fork bombing, hacking, or other methods that aren't honest debate and rhetoric all undermine the very soul if the collective and if someone is proven to have tried to do so, they need to be removed and all their backups deleted.