boop

>>60776206

The setting is supposed to be a grimdark setting which is supposed to be Sci-Fi, but not Science Fantasy, still having the technology, be bulky cluky, experimental and backwards.

And the Pulsartechnology is the root of this.

>>60776206
So basically the go to weapon is a anti-micro-circuit weapon?

Just taking a stab here, what about biomechanical systems, systems made partly or mostly out of organic components?

>>60778290
That I am a bit conflicted on myself.
Electromagnetic weapons and pulses in general have the magnetic component do most of the damage.

Because biological circuits like brains are chemically based that does nothing to them. If it did also the weapon would instantly kill all living things on board.

So I'd say if you could make a pure bio-ship like the Tyranids for example then the Pulsarbeam should do nothing.

If you have though biological things connected to circuits then the hit circiot would still be damaged and the electric overload would probably fry the biological part.

>>60778741
I think the most viable counter would be a ships that covers most vital functions with EM shielding and sends signals to lower priority organic calculators who take "educated guesses"

Also it wouldn't need to be purely organic, mostly secondary calculation devices like fire control while sensors and navigation computers could be shielded.

Of course a nice, slightly pulpy dieselpunk setting is fun too, I'm just talking on a harder level of sci-fi.

>>60778829
Well the whole assumption was that you can't just put up a convenient shield which fixes the problem and other workaround had to be found.

The thing is that computers would exist they would just need to be exceedingly large and bulky to function properly. As such they'd only be on ships.

>>60779107
Yea, it would make that one race which invented the shield overpowered and essentially a second revolution in Space Warfare back to technology again would follow.

So back to square one.

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>>60778219
I fucking love this type of setting. You could make it very 19th century, with Maxwell beams, Maxwell drives, Maxwell everything. Call it electropunk, with giant coils, switches and spark-spewing capacitors replacing pistons, cogwheels and fireboxes. Machinery could still be cooled by the water-steam transition.

How does the FTL work?
Here's an idea I've been mulling over:
FTL is a jump drive which depends on information processing, not physical machinery. The actual physical process of initiating a jump is simple and cheap, say creating a micro black hole which then immediately annihilates itself. However, the tricky bit is calculating exactly when and where to trigger the black hole so that the ship jumps to another star system, such jump points being where the ships' reaction drives are designed to fly them. This is computationally taxing, like Bitcoin mining, involving the momentums of thousands of nearby stars, and the further the jump, the more calculation must be done (as the number of stars that must be considered goes up as the third power of distance). This leads to diminishing returns as the FTL drive of your spaceship (really a computer bank) gets impractically large.

Energy is conserved, and how much of it goes into gravitational potential and how much into kinetic is determined by the spin of the black hole, thus allowing a ship's journey to consist of a chain of jumps with very fast coasting near stars inbetween jumps.

An interesting feature is that very far jumps are possible, such as for infiltration or ambush missions, but they require massive computing power. A planet based supercomputer could work out the jump coordinates years in advance, and the coordinates could be written on a piece of paper, again like bitcoin keys, allowing ships without FTL banks the size of planets to make jumps over very long distances - provided they are always in exactly the right place at exactly the right time for insertion and extraction!

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>>60782411
The reason I really like this idea is that the time complexity of the jump coordinate algorithm can be made to be as weird as the plot demands. For example, small ships could be faster than lumbering behemoths by physical necessity - there is an optimum mass of ship beyond which increased complexity due to increased mass outpaces the increased computing power of the heavier ship. Ships will get faster as technology advances, but they approach a limit, which can easily be kept within sane confines. The galaxy will always be big and take an inordinately long time to cross, regardless of whatever computronium bullshit you have. And a megatonne battleship with the most advanced FTL banks available will always be outpaced by a thousand tonne picket with century-old vacuum tube FTL banks. This kills stupid powercreep (looking at you Ian Banks) and helps to provide a stable technological setting for adventures on the High Void.

>>60776206
>as such let’s assume around 2 trillion humanly habitable planets.

Thats way too optimistic an estimate

test

>>60785088
That is after the gaxaxy presumably undergoing terraforming for millions of years.

If we don't have aliens doing terraforming irl then yes, but not in a Sci-Fi setting.

>>60782411
Great idea.
What if humanity speciffically posesses so called Computation-Worlds which are entire planets covered in propper sci-fi'ish supercomputers.

They calculate the coordinates to travel to new destinations far away over the request of speciffic ships. The ships then only have enough computational power to adjust the coordinates each jump over the changes which happened.

This means human can basically only use FTL in very short jumps or too cordinates already provided.

The Computation-worlds would be ridicously expenssive and hidden as one stray ship wandering into them would mean instant desctruction.

They would also pose rellgious signifficance as for humans afterlife means becomming part of the ideal state of being and happiness within the Computational-world.

Any ideas how other factions might handle the situation?
So humanity is basically an early 20th century coalition of states basically "electropunk".

Now we could have aliens which embraced:
1. Dieselpunk
2. Steampunk
3. Clockwork Technology
4. Biotechnology
5. etc...

As a workaround mixing it with Electropunk on ships, but otherwise having a distinct feel.

>>60782411
The Black Whole Drive makes perfect sense because black wholes and Pulsars are somewhat simmilar in many regards.

At least for the humans, because black wholes would produce some electromagnetic radiation which humanity can easily controll.

What FTL methods could the races focusing on other technlogy branches use?

Where is the grimdarkness though?

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>>60787891
Computation bases on planets would form an empire's trade routes, allowing faster travel in certain directions. A ship would jump in, and the computation base would calculate jump coordinates, communicating with the ship via radio morse code as the ship sped along near the system's star. The ship would then make the jump to the next system which also has a computation base.

When ships are travelling without computation base routes, they would be much slower. They would need to calculate each jump with onboard computers, making each jump shorter, and necessitating a slower trajectory further out from each star, to allow enough time for the onboard computer to complete its calculation. (Jump points are always roughly along the line from the current star to the destination star, so the ship knows roughly where it's going while its computer banks churn.)

Whole computation worlds, with enough computing power to run simulations of people, would be able to plot jump coordinates for much greater distances, but such jumps would be unbelievably expensive, and only for light vessels. Information-hauling "post" vessels sent via such jumps could form the nervous system of an empire (there's no FTL radio, only jumps.) Extremely long distance jumps, taking years to calculate in advance, could be used to send infiltrators into the heart of enemy empires.

Jump physics can be tweaked to allow whatever flavour of Void travel and combat one would like. For example, to reduce the time spent in boring freefall in the Void between jump points and destinations, we can say that jump points tend to cluster around the star's orbiting masses, such as planets, and the kinetic/potential mix can be adjusted so that a ship can jump to a position very close to a destination planet.

>Still, to survive an impact of even a dispersed Pulsarbeam or the residual radiation of a Pulsarfield all miniaturization had to be undone and electronics had to become as bulky as the 1950's.
Faraday cages apparently just not being a thing any more. And we somehow have "residual radiation" lingering about out in space?

>As such any advanced electronic system needs to be huge to work.
In a military context where everyone's shooting pulsarbeams all around, sure. Anything that isn't expected to stand up to military aggression would seem to be ok with miniaturizing to hell and back.

>Surprisingly anything advanced was weak to Pulsarbeams as such a single human ship was able to obliterate entire armadas.
And here the world bends over backwards for some HFY bollocks. So despite being so far ahead of us these aliens haven't come up with the pulsarbeam, haven't hardened against any equivalent EMP attacks, and can't use their superior technology to blast the human ships from out of range or anything, the fights all have to come down to battleship slugfests. Oh, and when it turned out that these primitives had this God Gun the huge and technologically superior alien empire failed to reverse engineer it to reach at worst technological parity and then just crush humanity under its massive industrial output advantage?

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>>60790052
>>60787891

The Computation Worlds themselves are the most guarded parts of the Human Coalition. The whole systems are fortified with giant space stations which authomatically destroy any unauthorised ship entering. Typical ships are not allowed closer than a light-week
of the Computation World.

The mind being uploaded into a Computatio-World while sought after by all humans and only recieved by the most succesful is actually a highly imperfect process.

Maybe 10-15% of your mind gets actually uploaded you may count yourself lucky if some of your consciousness survives. Mostly it's a way for the Computation Worlds to gather further information about the current state of the universe.

There is no salvation for hearoes, or those who spent their lives in service. There is no salvation for the capitalists enslaving trillions to afford the afterlife. There is no salvation for the Kings and Queens of the states of the Coalition.

>>60791004

> Faraday cages apparently just not being a thing any more. And we somehow have "residual radiation" lingering about out in space?

It's Sci-Fi mumbo jumbo, but it's not a literal hit with electri it is akin to a EMP, but it is you know Sci-Fi mumbo-jumbo. It is supposed to do a thing and it does the thing.

> In a military context where everyone's shooting pulsarbeams all around, sure. Anything that isn't expected to stand up to military aggression would seem to be ok with miniaturizing to hell and back.

That's why Computation Worlds exist. Think about it like that this is a Grimdark setting as such war is eternally waged.
A ship only reaching orbit of your planet destroys all electronics beyond repair.
Making electronics is exceedingly expenssive in the setting.

Would you be creating a massive unneded infrastructure of ridicously expenssive technology to have it destroyed?

No.

Because of that on typical worlds such technology is no used. Istead entire systems are designated to have their computationa output maximised and are guarded heavily as hell.

> And here the world bends over backwards for some HFY bollocks. So despite being so far ahead of us these aliens haven't come up with the pulsarbeam, haven't hardened against any equivalent EMP attacks, and can't use their superior technology to blast the human ships from out of range or anything, the fights all have to come down to battleship slugfests. Oh, and when it turned out that these primitives had this God Gun the huge and technologically superior alien empire failed to reverse engineer it to reach at worst technological parity and then just crush humanity under its massive industrial output advantage?

The Aliens obviously knew that there is a thoretical possibility of such technology. They believe it's implementation to be impossible in practice. There are a lot of explanations not to mention the aliens were not far ahead of humanity they just thought they were.

>>60791004
>>60791120

And the industrial output thing?
That's what they did. After a few years of war they managed to replicate enough of the human-type ships to bring the war to a stalemate...

I find posts like yours exceedingly annoying because of course you need to make up some unrealistic tech for Sci-Fi.

FTL-travel is impossible in itself afterall. Fucking 90% of Sci-Fi tropes are impossible in the eyes of physics.

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>>60787891
As for aliens, I have some more ideas.
It would be cool if humans' specific strength is in the ability to do mathematics, and general intellectual agility. This leads to human civilization and technology being heavily based around physics and computers. We're the electropunk slide-rule brandishing cigar chewing engineers of the galaxy, basically pic related aesthetic.

Aliens have a hard time wrapping their heads around math, so their technology took much longer to develop, by trial and error, and all of it is built in painstaking fashion by craftsmen who don't really know what they're doing scientifically. Their technology is much more aesthetic and much more reliable and long-lasting than human tech, but lacks raw power and the ability to mass-produce.

Of course, no math means no computers and thus no FTL, so they cheat. Alien ships are cybernetic constructs, built around void whales. Void whales have been domesticated by aliens as humans domesticated horses. They are intelligent to the point of sentience, but are very alien mentally, and a large proportion of their bodies is biological computer banks used for FTL jump calculations (like an electric eel's flesh-batteries). These biological computers are much faster than human electromechanical computers, making alien ships much better at FTL. However, aliens lack computer bases and worlds and cannot mass produce whales or ships. Human captains are terrified of the sleek alien ships that can pop from system to system and back again, moving through the stars without effort on missions of piracy, crewed by beings of immense physical power and beauty. Alien captains are also terrified of the soulless, ugly mechanical abominations that are human ships, slow but with weapons batteries bristling with incomprehensible energies of destruction, crewed by mad, scarily smart monkeys who have the ability to seemingly bend the laws of the universe to their will.

>>60791120
If you see a plot whole try to fill it out or justify it.
Don't screech "but that's impossible".

That's not how you worldbuild.

>>60787891

Anyway, I propose the Steampunk Race to be semiaquatic to Elf-mermaids.
Using steam technology for a semiqauatis species makes sense to me.

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>>60791212
Great idea. I would say that only a speciffic spacefaring race does that. Saying all would be weird.

Maybe previously they were a small warlike, but nomadic peoples who did occasional raids and piracy on the larger more advanced technological empires.

Once the thing with the rise of the humans happened the technological level of technology-based races would have been forcefully reduced meaning the rise of the Space Whalleriders.
They probably have because of that the strongest "ships" in the galaxy.

I'd say maybe they are like the Thyrrus from 40k. They seek only entertainment and tottal war.

We need only a name.

>>60791120
>>60791143
Yeah, you'll have some impossible tech and technobabble in SciFi. But as written here the technobabble doesn't hide the impossible shit, it merely highlights the absurdity of it all.

>And the industrial output thing?
>That's what they did. After a few years of war they managed to replicate enough of the human-type ships to bring the war to a stalemate...
Ok, so they've reach parity in ship and weapon design. At which point the industrial output and better base science level should mean they rapidly out-produce humanity and upgrade their shit faster. That won't be a stalemate for long.

>>60791229
Firs step, don't have the bigger and more advanced empire be the aggressors. They don't want war and they don't want to genocide humanity. Engineer a new reason for why the war started. This helps explain why they were slow to get going and won't just send humanity straight back to the neolithic when they do. A few human atrocities along the way ensure that they'll be keeping a very nervous finger on the triggers though.

A more severe issue is that the entire bloody setting is built around this one supreme plot device gun. Unless you're really fucking good at selling that one McGuffin (which will probably demand a lot of flavouring material and stressing the softness of the SciFi here, get your Girl Genius on or something like that) the whole thing will be kneecapped form the start leaving you with less of a plot hole in the foundation, and more a hole of a foundation.

>>60791319

Ok makes sense changing humanity to the agressors is a minor change.

Still you saying that that empire would have an easy time retaliating assumes that that empire had no neighbours which noticed it becomming ridicously weak and then attacking from all other sides... you know like it happens in history.

I also don't think the gun is a big problem... considering it's based on real life tech. It's simply an OP-EMP, but OK.
It's not a McGuffin it's a piece of Sci-Fi-tech.

I don't run with sci fi but I tried to theorycraft a means to have melee important again, ideally in a circumstance where it co-exists with firearms (A'la 1600s-1700s, or up to 1800s in Mid-East). Indeed, in my case the goal was to try and emulate much of that era's warfare in general. I am not sure quite to the point of line warfare, but more that marriage of melee and ranged fighting.

I am not smart on hard science so these concepts might be wrong scientifically. Premise runs with something similar to the Dune Holtzman shield. That one relied on speed (Slow blade penetrates the shield), this one would be based on joules:
>Shields operate on deflection of projectile with X joules.
>Personal shields defend against less joules than vehicular/stationary shields.
>Shields have a minimum and maximum joules threshold, as well as a threshold to how many cumulative joules it can absorb before 'breaking'.
>It is overcome either by volume of firepower (too many joules in too short a period of time), or sheer caliber of firepower (one or a few very powerful shots).
>Overcoming via volume of firepower is beyond what one man can carry. It can come about only from crew-served weaponry or vehicular weaponry.
>Overcoming via caliber of firepower is either at the upper limits of what one man can carry (think .50BMG or 20mm) and is highly limiting in ammo/rate of fire or is outright beyond what one man can carry.
>Explosives are kind of unclear for me since I don't know how much actual joules are impacted on someone from an explosion compared to the theoretical joules in the explosion itself.
>Power armor could break these limitations and allow higher-grade shields as well as carrying a weapon able to overcome via caliber (or enough ammo to overcome volume).

This could perhaps lead more to WW1 than to Napoleonic, as it would place a severe advantage on the stationary defender with his large caliber or high-volume emplaced guns but (next post)

>>60791394
Sounds great, but a shield like that seems pretty high tech.

Might be better to use it for aliens. Maybe there is an alien species which has attained a ridicously high potency with biotechnology as such their supperior biowarriors use this method of combat.

Instead for humans I'd make melee viable with what we already have:

1. I'd make humans use hydroponics based combat attachements (like in megalo box) which slow you considerably down, but add raw power.

2. The whole FLT of the setting is teleportation based. So maybe the soldiers can teleport from time to time if the ship outide of orbit does the calculations?

The limitation is that they would need to stand still quite long for the calculation to take place which is hard in the heat of battle. As such it is basically one time use.

>>60791004
I don't much like OP's pulsar beam tech either. Here's a way of nerfing it while making it more hard-scifi and adding to the electropunk of the whole setting:

Suppose the dark matter particle is capable, under certain conditions, of bonding together to form a solid. Call it Tenebruim (Tn), after the Latin for dark. And suppose that Tn is immensely strong, reflects all particles, and is totally transparent to light. Tn is a perfect electrical insulator, and is a structural material many orders of magnitude stronger than baryonic matter.

Tn is produced from dispersed dark matter in supernovae, and Tn lumps and dust bury themselves in planets, necessitating mining. Artifacts can be made from both existing lumps of Tn (low quality, low precision components like armour) or from processed Tn dust (high quality, high precision components like electrical devices, railgun actions, and anything else). Quality, small-grain Tn dust for tech applications is the most valuable substance in the galaxy, and a great McGuffin resource.

What Tn does is vastly expand the electrical possibilities of the setting, and add interesting atompunk possibilities. Coils of wire made of Tn tubes with plasma flowing in them can create immensely powerful magnetic fields. Radio equipment made of Tn could project beams of great power to overload and destroy delicate electronics. Tn makes relativistic railguns the ultimate weapon, and Tn armour the only defence. A rocket combustion chamber made of Tn can sustain the pressures and temperatures necessary for a continuous fusion reaction, making atomic torchships possible. Tn capacitors could store vast amounts of electric power compactly and conveniently. Against a Tn-armoured opponent in close quarters, a Tn-edged rapier could be more effective than a gun.

>>60791394

Still emphasizes or allows melee to shine as in a WW1 land environment it'd make quick and stealthy trench raiders shine - slip small stormtroopers into their position with melee weapons unimpaired by shields and now all their emplaced guns are worth nothing. Meanwhile power armor assumes a role akin to the tank. You'd still have tanks but I'd imagine their high silhouettes would make them exceptionally vulnerable to field cannons. Granted the tank has a higher-gauge shield, but the field cannons are also designed to overcome that. Power armor would be able to hide and use terrain better yet also be functionally immune against almost anything the average footsoldier can carry.

I'm brainlet on artillery but looking at the joules behind artillery explosives even if 1% of the relative megajoules behind, say, a 15mm HE shell is actually felt by the target (the rest being dispersed) that'd make an individual soldier's shield and the soldier himself into paste. So short of shielded fortifications and maybe vehicles artillery is still king.

>>60791472
Sure, whatever works best for you guys and feel free to tweak the above however you see fit. A possibly simpler solution is to just have ceramic/fabric-like-kevlar technology which has (temporarily) triumphed over conventional chemical munitions. Again, sufficient caliber (40mm shell will still turn you into paste) or volume (Kevlar or ballistic plates will likely break if you shot 2000 rounds of 22lr at it) overcomes it and lasers and/or gauss or plasma cut through it like butter. Therefore combat doesn't suddenly become Napoleonic or WW1 but in, say, a Fallujah style encounter or inside of ship combat you have to be adept at melee as well as firearms.

>>60791394
As a hard science fiction autist, I have spent far too many hours of my life thinking about how to achieve realistic close combat in a spaceship setting without introducing shields. Shields are very difficult to make into hard scifi, because they have so many other hard-to-predict applications. >>60791491 is my attempt at introducing something whose applications and consequences I have worked out to a degree.

>>60791491
So basically a second McGuffin which counters the first McGuffin and reverses the whole premise of the setting -__-

How the hell is a new material with magic properties never found in nature before "hard Sci-fi"

If it works like that it essentially counters the Pulsarbeam works and we end up with normal Sci-Fi again... just with a Tenebrium coating.

>>60791525

Seems like you did a good job of it, though I am a brainlet with it so I can't speak to it much. As long as it gives a semblance of scientific plausibility like you did (or I tried to with the joules) then I'm content. The only sci-fi shields I am iffy on would be star wars or star trek and that's just because I don't know what their basis is. As long as they give some lipservice then I'll be content

>>60791282
Yeah, I'd say having fewer alien species but fleshing them out more is good. So let's say only one species builds voidwhale ships. Maybe other species have leftover ships, powerful but rare, from past ages of high technology, which they can no longer build - like the Eldar. Others could make do with stolen voidwhale ships.

>>60791527
It doesn't counter the McGuffin. Tn based, massively high-energy electronics is how the pulsar beam works (it's just an incredibly high-power radio transmitter). Humans could build the transmitter because they can do physics. Aliens don't understand physics, so they couldn't even build faraday cages to protect their delicate biological, grown and cultivated rather than built, computers, because they can't science, though they've caught on now, making the beam much less effective. (Maybe the Eldar-like species could once do science but they've forgotten.)

Tn is a way of making everything harder sci-fi, while adding insane electropunk and atompunk tech which is scientifically consistent.

>How the hell is a new material with magic properties never found in nature before "hard Sci-fi"
Adding one new material with consistent properties is hard scifi. You work out the consequences in the setting to make everything consistent. My FTL system is also designed to be scientifically consistent while allowing a space-opera like setting.

>>60791525

OP here if it's really that important to explain how a plot-device in a Sci-Fi setting works I'll try to mumbo-jumbo it untill it is logical.

The magnetic field of a pulsar is so immensely powerful that if a human was as far from it as we are from the sun now then the electromagnetic field would literally overheat every single atom of a magnetic substance in the human body frying it and then ripping it out.

The Pulsarbeam emulates that raw power of a pulsar. A pulsar is essentially a highly condensed neutron-soup.

Under ridicously high gravity electron and protons merge together a Pulsar is a Star which essentially is one massive atom-nucleus created out of neutrons. It is the most highly condense form of energy in the universe.

The Pulsarbeam works on the basis of literally blowing up the pure Neutron matter using a mix of normal and antimatter. That sends a mass of magnetically charged neutron-like Qurks in the direction of the enemy.

A Pulsarfield on the other hand is a field of static Quarks which emulate the structure of a neturon. Once the magnetised Quarks from the beam hit the magnetic charge is evenly distributed.

The Neutron matter is obtained by detonating Pulsars using matter-antimatter bombs and then collecting the wreckage. Or by using massive planet-spanning particle accelerators.

Antimatter is obtained from Particle accelerators placed on Computation worlds.

Usually anti-iron + iron are used because iron the atom with the highest amount of nuclear energy stored.

>>60791696
I think having 3-4 alien Species would be optimal they all should have their nische and character though.

Still binding dark-matter to anything is unsicentiffic as hell becauset he only thing we know about dark matter so far is that it does not interact with matter by any other way than gravity.

So natural dark matter compund deposits existing... OH GOD. Is a powerful EMP really less made up sounding?

>>60776206
>Milky Way which has around 700 billion stars
Uhhh... Dude not even close. Milky way is roughly 200 billion.

>>60791793
400-700 billion.
According to the estimates I found.

Lowering it to 200 billion weon't change anything though so we can do that -_-

>>60791714
I suppose if we are getting into esoteric particle physics stuff, then that could make sense. I think you are operating on a much larger scale than I am and a much higher techlevel, thinking of blowing up neutron stars, ships that can process antimatter and neutronium weapons, etc. Tn makes all this a lot more tractable (eg how is neutronium stored outside its high gravity environment), but I guess it isn't strictly necessary. The sheer scale of the tech required to blow up neutron stars, make use of neutronium to send quark beams, and create large amounts of antimatter, is incredible, making 95% of W40K stuff look pathetic in comparison. Aliens would have to be engineers on the level of humans to even begin to compete in this setting.

Do you want to have AI in this setting? I like to limit AI to emulations and limit intelligence in general by some esoteric law of consciousness so that the smartest humans are the smartest it is possible for anything to be (smarter than that and the consciousness collapses or something), thus ensuring that we don't have to deal with million-IQ omniscient god-machines discovering all science and technology in 10 seconds. (this is boring)

>>60791756
We know dark matter doesn't interact electrically, but we don't really know about the nuclear forces. Let's say dark matter particles are so light that they bounce off baryonic nuclei without being detected (thus why they pass through the earth without us noticing), and that these particles are capable of bonding to each other if they are sufficiently hot. A lump of self-bonded dark matter would be totally transparent but would be solid to baryonic matter via nuclear interactions.

>>60791934
Well to be frank the Computation-Worlds were supposed to be the Godcomputers.

I actually thought of a setting in which ridicously high technology has been discovered and once used. One in which billions of stars were covered in Dyson Spheres. Then the weaponisation of neutron-quantumparticles changed everything.

Essentially the pre-grimdark Era of the Universe was like the DoT in Warhammer 40k or like Star Treck.

This is also not such ridicously advanced Sci-Fi. Because Creating and manipulating baclk wholes for teleportation would require an eaqual or higher understanding of quantum physics than manipulating Pulsar-matter.

Also blowing up pulsars would not be that high-tech.

You put antimatter+matter in a pulsar-matter cylinder throw it at the thing ant it goes boom. If you can't do something with firepower you're not using enough.

And yea. Pulsarmatter would decay leaving the Quark-cloud used in Pulsarfields. Essentially pusarfields would be giant aparatuses only supposed to slow down the natural decay of Pulsarmatter outside of high gravity. So essentially the pulsarfield itself would be a byproduct.

btw. dark matter has equal mass to normal matter, because gravity is tied to mass. Binding dark matter and it having literally any physical properties makes no sense... you can use exotic quantumparticles or quarks instead.

>>60791756
An EMP powerful enough that a single ship could lay waste to whole computing worlds does sound really made up. Real EMPs are powered by nuclear weapons, and electronics can be well protected against them with a bit of hardening. Either your planet brain busting EMP has to be absurdly powerful, powered by neutronium and antimatter as in >>60791714, making your ship as big as several cities and inflating the scale of the setting to Culture proportions; or the electronics you are zapping have to be very delicate and unprotected.

>>60792059
Well in the future the degree of minaturisation would be muuch, much higher as such all things would be more delicate.

And Computing Worlds are made for maximal computing output.

The 50's bulkyness is exactly a result of making circuits relatively save.

Not to mentiomn you're underastimating EMP's currently only some tailor-made military grade electronics would withstand an EMP-blast.

An EMP blast from what we can do now...

>>60792059
>>60792171
+ I think it was mentioned that ships were ridicously huge and bulky like small moons or something

>>60792038
Dark matter has mass, but we don't know if it's a few heavy particles, or many light particles. All you'd need to invent for it to have the physical properties of Tn would be to say the particle can form very strong nuclear bonds with other Tn particles.

Once you blast the neutronium off the surface of the pulsar, as soon as it gets far enough away it is no longer going to be bound by the high gravity of the pulsar and will immediately explode. You will need to bind it somehow. It is most likely impossible to bind it with electromagnetic fields produced from baryonic matter, as they are just too weak. You will probably need to bind it gravitationally using a black hole. Using a kugelblitz to create a macroscopic long lived black hole is Kardashev II levels of tech.

Creating a micro black hole (that will immediately disappear) is comparatively very easy, especially if you have Tn. It is even theorized that the LHC could produce micro black holes. You just need to concentrate a bit of energy within a very tiny space. Miniaturizing the LHC to a size that could fit on a thousand tonne ship would be easily possible with Tn.

>>60792207
Kardashev II is optimally using the energy of one star?

I thought we were at K2.5 or so as it's galactic scale anyway.

I don't thing pure nucleon matter would explode instantly. I think it would rather be slow decay akin to decay of big nuclear particles. This is the closest pararell to pure-nucleon matter we have afterall.

Not to mention sure creating a miroscopic non-permanent black whole is easier than creating a small permanent one.

But creating a massive temporary black whole able to engulf a ship and teleport it to a given location in space is a mastery of quantum physics which may not even theoretically be possible... way more difficult than creating a permanent min-black-whole.

>>60792171
>>60792182
Ok, so we are going with moon-sized ships that can mount antimatter and neutronium weapons. I usually like my settings smaller than that, but I guess crews of billions, ships that cause eclipses and so on does add a certain grimdark appeal.

I don't think we can have the computer worlds being superintelligences. A superintelligence would introduce tech that would replace 50's vacuum tube computers and billion-man crews with something more elegant. If the human brain can survive pulsar beams then human brains will be replaced with biocomputers if superintelligences exist to max out the tech tree.

>>60792301
Yea we need to rethink the exact techlevel of the setting.

The thing is the feel needs to stay. So:

1. Huge bulky ships with on-board computers having to be overly large to do anything and not be instantly broken.

2. Teleportation based FTL with teleportation coordinates only being possible to calculate for long distances with a whole world being dedicated to computating it.

3. The Computation worlds are ridicously important hard to replicate and very easy to destroy. They hold religious, economic and military signifficance.

4. Without a protective field which is ridicously expenssive to run (pulsar field previously) not even bulky 50's style electronics can be used savely so normal humans live at a technology level akin to the 1910's with clockwork and mechanical technology having been further developped.

>>60792279
You're correct that my FTL system is bullshit. It's designed to be consistent bullshit, to allow a human-scale scifi civilization to spread out among the stars, but then again, any FTL system is going to be bullshit.

The black hole doesn't engulf the ship, it pops in and out of existence on a subatomic scale. This causes [quantum bullshit] to happen, resonance, 4th dimensional reflection, and such mumbo jumbo, which results in the ship finding itself nearby another star, the total of its kinetic and potential energy the same. Think of it as glitching the physics engine of the universe. In nearly all points of space at nearly all times, creating a micro black hole has no effect. It's just at specific points and instants of time that this results in a useful glitch.

This is very very much bullshit, but is the best system I have been able to come up with that allows FTL to exist with technology on a scale that is comprehensible to humans.

Neutronium would explode instantly, because it is bound not by internal forces, but by the pulsar's gravity.

>>60792386
Actually there would be things holding it together such as the strong-atomic-force.

The strong atomic force automatically hods nucleus parts togther. That's the reason that the proportion of neutrons in the most stable istotop of an atom grows with the overall mass as it has to balance out the incresing instability from the protons pushing each other way.

In a pure-neutron mass the strong-nuclear-force would be holding it together to some extent, but in my opinion it would still slowly decause because the qurks being diffused is more energetically optimal than being shoved together.

>>60792386
Anyway any decent idea how to replace pulsar-magic-macguffin with another "tech needs to be bulky" macguffin?

Except an even more unrealistic dark matter macguffin obviously...

This thread has become to clustered and mostly arguing once we figure out the rules of the setting and technology level I'll start another thread in a few hours where we can actually start some worldbuilding.

>>60792382
Well, they'd only need to be confined to clockwork, diesel and steam if they were constantly under attack by pulsar beam weapons. Maybe every inhabited planet in the galaxy is constantly under threat from ships jumping in from hostile empires, making a hit and run attack, and jumping out, enemy computer worlds being used to calculate these very long jumps.

Let's say you're right about neutronium. I don't know enough physics to contradict you, all I know is that in Dragon's Egg, a hard-scifi about tiny, dense aliens that evolved on a neutron star, neutronium needs a micro black hole gravity field to avoid exploding when away from the neutron star. But it could be different in this universe, and neutronium is a cool power source.

Dropping tenebrium makes small, human-scale ships and combat impossible. Tn allows small nuclear propulsion systems to be built, propulsion systems that can be owned and operated by a handful of people rather than an LHC-worth of engineers. It also allows a lot of cool, simple,small technology like extremely energy dense power sources, handheld railguns and so on. Tn makes space combat more relatable, its use as near-impenatrable armour makes ships more survivable so that space battles last longer than a tenth of a second. It does all this by fiddling with the properties of a mysterious particle we already know exists - the amount of bullshit involved in Tn is microscopic compared to the amount of bullshit involved in the glitch jump FTL system (let's call it the Gravitational Reflection Drive, and add the cool property that the spaceship arrives at the other side as a mirror image of itself.) So I'd like to keep Tn.

Of course, if you want everything to be at a colossal, billion-crew scale, then Tn is unnecessary - we can just say that the nature of directed EMP weapons is such that delicate electronics do not survive, and that the technology is not there yet to create biocomputers because nobody has managed to build an AI.

You say that Tenebrium is a perfect insulator from everything then again you say that plasma flowing trough tubes made out of it would produce magnetic fields. If it truly is a perfect insulator it would not. Because the magnetism would not get out of the tube.

So youre essentially saying it's a perfect insulator in one direction while in the other things get trough ideally.

I'd drop Tenebrium, it makes no sense and here you also add that it's a ridicously good shield against phsical damage.

Using Pulsar-matter would be better it's a limited hard to obtain resource which decays over time and exists in reality.

Let's say the minimal leangth of a ship is about 10 kilometers. Not ridicously big, but way to big and bulky to be able to land on a planet or come too close and escape it's gravitational pull.

Small ships are purpusfully made to not exist so that land warfare is viable. If you have small high-precission ships it would make land warfare useless.

Istead if you want to fly a plane you have only the navigational systems used in WW1. With engines of supersonic speed. Good luck making that work.

This would let ground warfare shine again, because a space ship can do nothing except give logistic support or if it is well armed blow up the planet. So conquest of planets is much harder.

>>60792732
When it comes to bioships.

I'd make them a thing, but let's have them work like they would in real-life.

They can have computational power as efficient as the human brain, but!
Biotechnology and mechanic technology can't be perfectly integrated.

As such a bioship would need to carry ridiculous amounts of glucose as fuel making them equally as clunky.

Bioships also can't create their own teleportation black wholes. Instead the bio-technology using civilisation has created colonies around black wholes with which it creates resonance to teleport it's ships out.

Then again after a set amount of time the bioships need to be in the same spot to go back. All the FTL is handled remotely from their biostations surrounding natural black wholes.

As such their military assaults need to be very precisely timed as their ships don't have a built-in FTL-drive.

>>60792987
* this kinda kills the idea of Space Whales having FTL though

>>60792933
That's not how magnetism works. The wire in existing coils is insulated to avoid short circuits. An electrical insulator is something that electrons themselves can't get through, but electric and magnetic fields can.

Tn can also be limited in supply. I think it would be interesting to limit the supply of versatile Tn dust much more than the supply of larger Tn lumps, so that armour is cheaper than weaponry and circuitry despite using a greater mass of Tn.

10 kilometers is ridiculously big for a ship. Assuming identical proportions, such a ship would be 50000 times the volume of an Iowa-class battleship. Assuming identical crew density, it would have a crew of 140 million. These numbers can be fiddled, but however you fiddle them, that is stupidly vast - and that's your smallest ship.

Pitched battles on land are useless with small or big spaceships. Big spaceships can field non-voidworthy atmospheric craft to strike from above. Flying these with early 20th century technology is easy, you just replace precision with raw power. And big ships themselves can strike from orbit if they have to. All they need are coordinates.

Fighting on planets will either be limited war (seizing a city without destroying it), or will be to take hardened underground positions.

>>60793114
Except an EMP works with an electro-magnetic field inducing overload in a system so Tenebrium as you describe it would not actually protect anything from the Pulsarbeam...

Hmm, so maybe 1km long ships being the smallest type and 10km long being close to the maximum.

Bioships would have to be smaller, but would be quicker to move.

Small bioaircraft would be impossible due to consuming glucose not being able to produce enough propulssion on a small scale.

The crew densty would probably be also much smaller as everything is filled with massive computers everywhere.

The feel on a human ship should be the claustrophobic paranoia of the earliest submarines.

Still I think we need some reason why voidworthy ships don't just wreck planets making ladwarfare impossible.

Some sort of simple way every planet could have to counter voidships and them just shooting projectiles at the planet...

>>60792987
I like the idea of colonies around small black holes that can travel using a similar method of black hole based jumping. Maybe they are relics of the ancient technologically advanced alien civilization, which before its fall developed advanced biotech that is resistant to directed EMPs and also created the small black holes using kugelblitz technology.

It would be cool if the black hole colonies can also FTL jump around on occasion. There may be only a few of them, but when a Flesh Star appears in the sky of a human world, squirming with decayed, ancient biotech, it could make for some great Lovecraftian scenes.

You could have them and void whales. Maybe void whales were also created by the ancient civilization, but continued to evolve and thrive in the Void until some of them were domesticated by the void whale rider aliens. The wild ones still exist, and we could have the Moby Dick like tale of a human scientist's attempt to capture one and use it in human ships.

>>60793308
Hmm, a whole massive black whole with a giant biological dyson-spere-thingy surrounding teleporting arround would be overpowered as hell.

Like nothing could counter it... except the super-sci-fi stuff which has been removed by the Pulsarbeam.

What if instead we had the black-whole-communities travel at sub-light speed.

Essentially they still are na unstoppable behemoth, which appears out of nowwhere and you know maybe a few days before arrival. But it would limit that civilisations combat ability.

Maybe the Voidwhales exist, but if they can calculate their own routes then other bioships also could.

What if the Whales use a different type of FTL?
Let's say the whales instead of teleporting like other's do use a method of twisting space around them to create a bubble of space in which they stay still, but it moves in FTL.

I heard that method described once. As such their FTL is still pretty quick, but much slower than human FTL.

It would also add to the feal because the whale would flop in and out of it's pocket dimmension like how real whales do out and in from water.

>>60793406
>>60793308
Oh and the Whales are suspected to be from somewhere far away maybe even another dimmension because noone can confirm. Their anatomy is so foreign that they can only leave their pocket-dimmensions for a short time or they fall sick.

Their FTL could be replicated by creatures of our dimmension, but it can't be combined with black-whole FTL. As having a pocket dimmension open means it is teleported along with you which causes such a massive interferance that not even the Dyson-Sphere computers of old could calculate the teleportation of a bubble-dimenssion with help of a black whole-drive.

>>60793298
It doesn't protect anything from the EMP beam as it does not interact with anything via the electromagnetic force. Thus EMP beams are still lethal to delicate electronics. Tn makes electronic technology more gargantuan, clunky and high-power, allowing EMP beams to exist in more compact and cheap form.

What Tn protects against is good old kinetic attacks. At the kind of speed that things go in space, dropping some nuts and bolts in the path of an enemy ship does more damage than battleship shells. Without incredibly fast computers and laser point defence to shoot it down, you need bullshit tough armour to make spacecraft survivable enough that space battles last longer than seconds.

Bioaircraft are very possible if biotech is at all advanced. The biotech that comes from the advanced ancient alien civilization should definitely exceed human tech, just that it is rare doesn't replace itself very fast.

Any spaceship setting will have spaceships that can wreck the surface of a planet. Cold War era human civilization could wreck the surface of a planet and we didn't even have spaceships. This is not a problem that we can solve. I think we should just say that traditional land battle is impossible, except for storming underground fortresses that can't be touched from above, and waging limited war.

>>60793406
Well it isn't the size of a dyson sphere. It's a medium black hole, small enough to be able to turn mass into useful power via Hawking radiation. The colony surrounding it would be bigger than the biggest human cities, but not planet-eating big.

Medium size black holes could be the ultimate McGuffin for this setting. The smaller a black hole is, the faster it turns its mass into energy in the form of radiation. So a black hole can be so small that it just explodes like a nuclear bomb, or so large (like natural black holes) that its power output slows to a trickle. A medium black hole would be the ultimate power source, turning any kind of mass into virtually unlimited energy - allowing any kind of matter to have the energy output of the equivalent mass of antimatter. We can also say that such a black hole can be used for a better, faster variant of the Reflection Drive.

Making such a medium black hole is very hard, so we can say that it is currently beyond human civilization of the setting. Such a black hole can only be obtained by killing a Flesh Star, and this could be a big story- killing a Flesh Star and using the medium black hole to build a uniquely powerful and fast human ship.

I really don't like the idea of adding more than one method of FTL or extra dimensions. I think it will make the hard-scifi aspect of the worldbuilding much much too complicated.

>>60793481
Oh, I finally understand what you mean!

So Tenebrium makes the possiblity of old-school clunky stuff to be able handle much higher electric flow.

I think that's somewhat unneded because of the Pulsarfield stuff. Having a could of neutronlike particles surrounding the ship sounds just cooler in my opinion.

What if we made tenebrium a highly potent kinetic energy absorber instead of really hard though?

Let's say if you coat your ship in Tenebrium the tenebrium perfectly disperses the kinetic energy arround the whole shihaul. Making damage build up.

Still with attacks with shooting bigger bullets the layer of tenebrium would slowly be "cut-off" revealing the ships weak parts.

Planets could do something simmilar.

A more important planet could have massive reserves of pulvarised Tenebrium which it shoots out into the atmosphere that. Way any kinetic energy is nullified and dispersed troughout thep planet.

Thus making orbital bombardment not viable.
Tenebrium in pulvarised form is toxic and the particles are so small no sort of gasmask can protect you from it, but very light as such it quickly leaves the higher atmosphere leaving the lower parts intact.

Tenebrium-dust can't be realistically used as a bioweapon because a tenebrium bomb dropped on the surface would cause a small explossion and then would leave the atmosphere in a straight line up.
( not to mention the bomb falling gently to the ground as all the kinetic energy has been absorbed)

Any devices which could set off a nuclear or keep antimater stable can't be used either so that would make cool ground combat an option.

>>60793657
I was more thinking of them just starting colonies around huge natural black wholes and using them as operational bases. And natural black wholes are all much heavier than our sun.

I think being able to use black wholes so freely and even as bombs is a bit too high tech. If you can just mold black wholes like that, you can do anything.

I think having the Pulsarbeam be a poorly understood use of neutronmatter is the highest tech that should exist.

Maybe let's even remove the mass-production of antimatter instead the pulsar-matter is the one produced by particle-accelerators.

I'd make Tenebrium in gas-form relatively easy to produce from raw black matter. (which is pletiful everywhere)

It would temporarily bind to gases in the atmosphere and once the pressure is low enough and it does not bind fast enough to a matter molecule it decays back into dark matter.

Solid tenebrium would be very expenssive to produce asit would require trapping the molecules of the substance in elaborate cristaline nets.

So summary of progress:

Factions:
Humans - live under a Coalition of humans. Culturally like early 1950's or 1920's/10's. Most humans live without having any technology. Tenebrium is used by humans to enhance their ships against kinetic attacks same as planets.

Unannamed Whalers - unknown technologically inept species. They tamed huge space WHales which mostly travel in their FTL pocketdimmensions. Formerly just pirates, barbarians and maruders. They love art and are obsessed with it. They carved out an Empire after the fall of the old races. They can't put Tenebrium directly on the Whale as it's toxic, but they cover it with Tenebriu covered armour...

Unnamed Biotechnological's - their ships can't use classic FTL as such they settles around black wholes and sychronise with them instead to transport ships. Their ships can't be covered in Tenebrium nor do they bother with adapting to that. Instead they use the processing power of their biocomputers to launch explossive misiles shooting down any incomming attacks.

Pulsarbeams and -fields are poorly understood, but widely used. They are based of obtained pulsarmatter which can only be obtained with the help of particle accelerators.

>>60793728
So you want a material that turns kinetic energy in its vicinity into heat? Presumably momentum is also conserved. It's an interesting idea.
Working out all the consequences of Tn is complex enough. I don't even know where to begin understanding this.
Maybe we can add something else, entropium (Et), which are black gasesous particles that absorb all energy nearby and convert it into heat. As Et heats up, it goes through the entire black body spectrum. Any particles moving faster than the Et particles while near them has its kinetic energy dissipated until it and the Et particles are the same temperature. As Et heats up, it goes through the spectrum of black body radiation. Any EM radiation striking the Et is absorbed if it is higher frequency than the frequency the Et is emitting.
Et should be much rarer than Tn. Tn armour laced with Et would be resistant to all kinds of attacks including kinetic and radiation. A directed EMP beam would not be absorbed, however, as the Et could not be cold enough - and if it is cold enough, you just shoot the enemy with a laser until his Et barrier is warm enough to allow EMP beams through.

I like this idea, let's add it.

>>60793939
I guess natural black holes could have some function with regard to the FTL jump system. Maybe they allow more efficient jumping, allowing the ancient biotech aliens using them to raid over great distances. But I really want to have a few medium black holes around, left over from the days of the ancient technological empire. They are great McGuffins, but not overpowered.

>>60794545
No working it into heat would be too OP.
I'm thinking of dispersing it in a way like...

Imagine a bullet hits a 1square meter Tn-plate. Then it's as if the plate itself hit you with the force of a bullet.

That means that the bigger the Tn-surface the greater the effect.

If you hit a human wearing full-Tn-armour with an anti tank gun. He won't be thrown back, but his internal organs will be torn to shreds by the sheer kinetic energy hitting his whole body at once.

As for the gas particles I thought they'd give the kinetci energy to the air molecules they are conected too actually dispersing it has heat.

Additionally solid Tn would be soft as rubber. So it's not invincible in space combat. Ships would first shoot at each other massive blades to cut of swatch of the armour-plating before using kinetic projectiles.

Simmilar to land-combat what makes melee quite valuable and useful.

The gas-form would also not absorb things instantly. The hotter the air the lower the "kinetic storage potential" as such if an antire armade of ships came at some point they'd heat up the planet enough for the bombardment to come trough.

It's inefficeint though.

>>60794605
Maybe they exist, but can't be replicated anymore? Something left back by even more ancient aliens.

Those could serve as "colony ships" to reach new natural black wholes and settle them. Or as heads of a massive armada. They'd serve as a mobile fortress coordinating FTL-mobility during an actual battle.

Making fighting one of thse one of the greatest menaces in the galaxy. Only very,very few of those could exist though. Like a few dozen.

>>60794605
Meant to reply to >>60793789

>>60794212
Humans have early 20th century mechanical and electrical tech with quite advanced bio/medical tech. Because the civilization is so old, all their buildings and cities are gargantuan. We can flesh out human history and politics after we've got the scifi basics.

Tenebrium is used by all races as an essential material for building high-energy electrical technology, and as a structural material. Its immense strength allows the construction of gargantuan structures like city-ships and ring habitats, while its strength and its insulating properties allow high-energy but low-complexity nuclear and electric technology (think passenger flying cars powered by miniature suns) to be astonishingly widespread.

Entropium is an exceedingly rare material almost all of which is sucked up into military applications. Tn armour laced with tiny amounts of Et is incredibly good defence against just about anything, meaning that most assaults from orbit would end up melting the crust before they destroyed an armoured city. Thus planetary assaults make use of ground-based troops to storm protected structures.

FTL is achieved via creating a subatomic black hole at exactly the right place and time, requiring massive computing resources. A variant of this can be done with a medium black hole. Void whales also work by creating subatomic black holes, and they have biologically generated Tn components within their bodies to do so (they need to eat some Tn as they grow.)

>>60794817
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Creating a medium sized black hole, big enough not to explode instantly, is very difficult, but keeping one alive by constantly feeding it matter isn't that hard. So these medium BH's can be millions of years old, left over from a truly forgotten time.

>>60794767
I don't like it. We have to have conservation of momentum and conservation of energy, otherwise the consequences just get too silly.

So say a guy in full Tn armour is hit by a tank shell. It doesn't penetrate the armour, but he gets thrown backwards due to conservation of momentum. The same thing would happen if he were hit by a tank shell while wearing Tn armour laced with Et.

However, if he were hit by a laser or x-ray beam while wearing Tn armour, it would go right through, melting the ordinary material layers of the armour and vaporizing the soldier. On the other hand, if the armour was laced with Et, the xrays or laser beam would be red-shifted as they approached the Et layer, heating it up. The heat would be vented as steam by a heat-exchange system, and the radiation would be turned into harmless infrared.

Applying this to space, a sufficiently fast relativistic penetrator could penetrate ordinary Tn armour, but not Et laced Tn armour. And the protection against EM radiation would also exist, meaning that nasty radiation cancer weapons are impossible.

Space combat would be over when one of the ships got a lucky strike at an insufficiently armoured area, or when one of the ships had absorbed so much energy that it was too hot to continue fighting, much as in The Mote in God's Eye.

>>60794904
I think it would be better if the Void Whales used the proposed dimmensional-bubble travel option.

Them having pop out of space like Whales out of water would add character.

I'd say Tenebrium as simply a strong material is good. So Tenebrium became simply a light, good insolating material which is very hard and produced from dark matter.

I'd make it so that ring-habitats around stars can't be built anymore. The ancients had technology to do that the current races can only keep the ones which already exist somewhat working. (after converssion to the overly bulky tech-forms)

Creating mini-suns perse itoo OP fusion reactors are OK. Flying cars also can't exist post the technological crisis except on Computation worlds. Fusion reactors also need massive computers to stabilise the core.

I'd also make Et very common because there has too be enough of it to supply most planets to be able to blast it into the atmosphere...

It could be made by flipping matter to Alice matter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_matter) and compounding it with electrons has been industrialised and that's what is released into the atmosphere.

Trapping Etherium within cristaline mattes is much harder. And is exlussively used for coating space-ships and ground-troop armour.
Solid Etherium is known as the Alice Shield. Sadly the material itseld is only as soft as rubber and can be cutt of.

That's why underneth there is always Tn supporting the structure of the ship letting it take maybe one more hit after the Alice Plate is gone.

>>60795063
I think it's a bad idea to have Tn laced with Et. I'd make them incompatible and maybe have a layer of Et-matter and underneeth a layer of Tn which protects against energy blasts.
And underneeth another layer of Et-matter in case the uppler layer has been destoyed by energy weapons etc.

So essentially you would need layered armour where different layers are vounerable to different attacks.

>>60795260
On second thought I'd remove weapons shooting raw energy entirely except plasma-throwers.

Medium range wepons equivalent to a flamethrower.

All armour would have an outside Alice Plate (Et-matter) and underneeth Tn. Et let's trugh energy blasts, but is not damaged by it.

I'd say advanced energy-blast weapons should be rare. Maybe limited to one faction which sucks at iother things.

>>60794904
I think it's best if everyone uses the same physics. The less you deviate from real-life physics, the harder the scifi. Whales are still whales even if they don't literally live in another dimension.

Yeah, no new ringworlds is good. It's good for them to be ancient technological wonders.

These fusion reactors aren't complex. It's just a small chamber made of Tn. Tn is so strong that you can get fusion level pressures in a handheld device. It makes every piece of technology amusingly powerful, but not OP due to radiation concerns.

Yeah, that system works for Entropium. Making it so common would definitely help to nerf ranged weapons and make close combat more viable.

>>60795394
OK we need some new race. Because right now we have humans and 2 biological ones.

What if we have a semiaquatic race. (mermaids)
Which use steampower, but not waterbased.
They use a special solvant capable of dissolving Entropium letting their steamengines store immense amounts of kinetic and heat energy.

Essentially they release the energy from the liquid when shooting bullets or to move basically anything.

They use the same mode of space travel as the Whales as it's stealthier calling it the Mobius Drive (let's call the whales Mobius)

They look like steampunky mermaids which have hydroponic leg-replacements when in land combat.

>>60795298
A laser is a weapon that shoots pure energy. Tn based electronics also allows a plethora of other energy based beam weapons, electron beams, x-ray and g-ray lasers, you name it. But Et protects against all of these quite well.

Nuclear plasma throwers will definitely be a thing, they will basically be the rocket engines of the setting used as weapons. But they will be short range. They will operate by spewing out so much energy that the Et armour of the target heats up and melts whoever is inside. Such weapons would be quite big, rare and expensive, because they are basically mini spaceship engines. Ordinary troops would use a variety of Tn-based railguns, and melee Tn blades.

>>60795506
No Et only protects against kinetic energy Tn protects well against electronic based weapons.

Tn allows for the creation of lasers and other energy weapons those are powerful, but prone to overheating thus mostly only used by experienced soldiers.

Usually the properties ot Tn are used to create magntic coils arround wepons to help supper-accelerate ferromagnetic bullets to ridiculous speeds.

>>60795478
Yeah Mobius drive is a good name for the FTL system in general, in reference to how it twists spacetime resulting in the travelling ship arriving after the jump as a mirror image of itself.

I like the idea of an aquatic race. Mermaids aren't grimdark enough, so let's make them Cephalopoids, sentient octopus-like beings. They are the most secretive race, dwelling deep in the oceans of worlds across the galaxy. It's only rarely that human voidsmen have seen their ships crossing between worlds. They seem to have no centralization, being divided into colonies, and their numbers, range of habitat and full powers are unknown.

>>60795563
Tn is dark matter, which does not interact with the electromagnetic force, so anything on the EM spectrum, from radio to gamma rays, passes right through it.

Entropium levels all forms of energy down into heat, including EM and kinetic energy. We have to have something that can deal with X-ray and G-ray beam weapons, otherwise they will be the only weapons worth having. Et deals with high frequency EM radiation while allowing low frequency EM radiation, such as directed EMPs to kill electronics, to still be effective.

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>>60795563
Yeah I agree with these applications of Tn to weapons. Energy weapons would definitely have a heat problem. A spooled up energy weapon would scream like a jet engine, its internal cooling turbines blasting out jets of red hot air.

What would a typical Tn based nuclear ship look like? Well the actual FTL-capable ship would be gargantuan, with massive radiators, spinning rings for artificial gravity, and so on. But to add to the early 20th century vibe, the shuttles that go to and from the surface might be like seaplanes, but the size of oceangoing ships. The ship would be boarded at a literal dock. The fusion powered rocket engine would begin in water-breathing mode, using nuclear heat to vaporize water and exhaust it, accelerating the ship until it rose out of the water on hydrofoils, and then accelerating it further until it took off. As the ship climbed out of the atmosphere, the engine would continue to use water from internal tanks as propellant, burning so hot that the water is turned to plasma. Once in orbit, the engine can use its maximum efficiency mode (maximum exhaust velocity), where its only exhaust is nuclear plasma directly from the reactor chamber. In this mode, it is a torchship that can continuously accelerate for months, allowing it to travel interplanetary distances. To travel interstellar distances, a much larger FTL capable ship is needed.

>>60795740
I'd make them like the Eldar... the one pretty species.

Maybe just because I like mermaids XD

Also I think merimads in gothic-steampunk-dresses walking around on robotic leggs make a great esthetic.

They might be partly known as a race of seducers and diplomats. Who can tap their long tongues into another lifeforms brain to absorb information.

I'd make it so that there was a progenitor species looking to some extent like humans and as they died out they encoded a virus to have things evolve back into their original form.

Most of their descendant races are minor tribla ones though.

They created the permanent mini black wholes. And the biotechnology-race is a descendant of theirs. Part of a once small cult trying to obtain immortality in the face of extinction.

I'd have Et convert everything into kinetic energy not heat, because heat is essentially a type of radiation so light, but also an expression of kinetic energy of particles.

So an X-Ray hitting a Et-Plate would feel as if you were directly punched from every direction at the energy of the beam.

Thus only X-Ray waves are useful wepons as prolonged X-ray exposure feels just like uncomfortable pressure.

And X-Ray hitting Et-gas would actually cause heating up because well explained earlier.

Still Et can only be used to protect from dualistic atter so photons, electrons etc. Quark based wepons like pulsarbeams go right trough.

>>60796116
This is a great idea.

Smaller ships let you get stuff out of the planet which can be put on the interstellar ones in orbit, because those can't get to planets.

This system sounds really cool. It probably would be regulated with elaborate clockwork mechanisms which humans would keep track of.

>>60796116

I'd remove the spinning rings from the ships they make to easy of a target.

What if we essume Entropium works like here:
>>60796133
So artifficial gravity is created by having Alice Pates (solid entropium) on the roof and bombarding it with X-Ray radiation. Thus it would constantly create a kinetic force pushing downwards.

It's not perfect gravity, but an illusion of it working on the outside of the body letting it function norally.

Some of the internal organs still are in a a state of weighlessness so staying too long in space has consequences especially on the heart. The bones stay fine because of the force.

>>60796116
>>60796194
An advantage of this system of sea-going SSTO craft is that every time a ship takes off, it leaves massive clouds of steam in its wake, to the point that spaceport cities would be perpetually shrouded in fog.

>>60796133
Progenitor species is good. I like my secretive octopus race though, very Lovecraftian. Maybe the creepy mermaids didn't invent technology themselves, but were exposed to it by the voidwhale rider aliens, with the result that the mermaids took over certain whale rider societies and rule them by priestcraft. So two main faction groups of whale riders, one enslaved by the eerie psychological arts of the merpeople, the other free bandits and pirates.
Immortality cult idea is also good. They achieved their wish of long life, but their consciousnesses were consumed and corrupted, kind of like the Flood/Precursors from Halo.

Heat isn't a type of radiation, it's the most entropic form of energy. Et can't convert to kinetic energy without fucking with momentum conservation.

Accepting what you said about quark weapons, they're an entirely different technology from EMP beams. EMP beams are common, they're just powerful Tn based radio transmitters. Let's say quark beams are much more powerful and difficult to produce, Death Star scale weapons, but go right through Et armour and can decimate whole fleets.

>>60796273
You're confusing kinetic energy with force. Force does not necessarily represent energy.
When I say that Et levels all kinds of energy down into heat, it actually is converting that energy into kinetic energy, but it's randomized kinetic energy, dispersed among the Et particles, which is the same thing as heat.

Artificial gravity rings are only for luxurious civilian ships. Military ships don't have them, having instead a cramped, weightless submarine-like atmosphere.

>>60796460
I think at least that basic degree of artificial gravity would be needed in military use ships especially has melee combat is important in the setting.

So bone structure stays intact. Still like 1 in 10 of the soldiers dies of heart failure simply by reentering gravity.

True artifical gravity with spinning wheels would exist on space stattions and high nobility/capitalist ships.

Yea I may be confusing energy with force.
But damage stacking as "overheating" frankly is somewhat lame.

Istead damage being accumulated as if you were constantly being punched from all sides seems way cooler.

EMP weapons are the weak preolded variant used occasionally the Quark based weapon is the Pulsarbeam.

Powerful EMP'as are compact and as such sometimes used by pirates or officers which managed to board and enemy vessel. To swiftly take out electronic devices from there as the Pulsarfield only protects from Pulsarbeams and the Et-layer outside is protecting the bulky electronics from EMP attacks.

>>60796460
When I say heat here I mean thermal energy.
Essentially what Entropium does is expedite the inevitable process by which energy is turned from useful forms to useless forms (heat). The greater the gradient between the source of energy and the Et, the faster the Et makes the energy flow to equalize that gradient.
So a 50 degree object placed near Et which is at 20 degrees will cool, faster than in a normal 20 degree environment, but not all that fast, until it and the Et are at the same temperature.
But a 2000 degree object placed near Et will equalize with the Et exponentially faster, in the blink of an eye.
Similarly, a marble rolling along a table made of Et will decelerate quite slowly, its kinetic energy being converted into thermal energy in the Et (same as what friction does). But a bullet shot at an Et plate will slow down so rapidly that it knocks lightly against it. Same with a relativistic projectile (but the Et will heat up more), and in each of these momentum is conserved.

>>60796753
I'd remove the heating as the base I'd have the kinetic force be it. It's slightly less logical, but a bit cooler.

A kinetic force comming out of it would also be a good yet grimdarkly imperfect artifficial gravity replacement as mentioned.

>>60796639
Melee in zero gravity would be cool. Soldiers would use electrically powered maneuvering jets and magnetic boots to get around. It makes a change from the ground combat which is in gravity.

Heat can be made cool. Every set of armour, on men, tanks or ships, would have to have a giant cooling system to vent the heat generated from taking hits. Water is cheap and has a high specific heat, ideal as a coolant, so there would be jets of superheated steam shooting everywhere. Turning the energy into kinetic 'knocks' makes no sense physically. If you are hit with a 1GJ projectile, then that energy has to go somewhere. My Et turns it directly into heat. Your Et turns it into kinetic knock, which still has 1GJ. If you punch something with an energy of 1GJ, then that will turn into heat anyway. Heat will still be your biggest problem.

>>60796861 See above - turning the energy into a kinetic pulse is just a roundabout way of turning it into heat.

You would actually get a 'kinetic pulse' anyway, because of conservation of momentum. The momentum of the incoming projectile would be transmitted through the armour into the ship, resulting in a satisfying knock. The energy of the projectile would be turned into heat, though.
There would be no kinetic pulse as a result of EM weapons, though.

Things so far summed up:

Solid Entropium - a plastic-like substance, which is a perfect absorber of particles and thing which have wave-particle dualism. It expresses the absorbed energy as kinetic force. (espenssive)

Gaslike Entropium - is ridicously light as such it escapes in seconds ot the higher atmosphere after being released as such inspite of toxicity can't be used as chemical weapon. It absorbs any form of energy into kinetic force applied to gas particles it latched on too. Expressing it as heat. (relatively cheap)

Tenebrium - a very hard and powerful building material as well as close to perfect insulator of cables.

Merdians - a semiaquatic race of mermaids which look remarcably human. They can extract information by "eating" brains. They use a Mobius drive which is based of the biological FTL method of the Void Wheale (Mobius Beluga). The rest of their technology is steampunk based.

Mobiates - known as Mobius Riders. They are a race of pirates and barbarians wich lack any resembiance of ability to use reason and logic. Simmilarly to the Thyrrus of WH40k they live only to entertain themselves and an imaginary audience engaging in excess and overly theatrical warfare.

Humans - invented the Pulsar-wepons. Culturally like 1910's/20's/50's. Technology is overly bulky and seemigly preolded. They use the Micro-Black-Whole-Drive also known as MBW-Drive. Their culture, milatary, idustry and economy are all centered arround the extrmely fragile Computation Worlds.

Guutla'tl - an ancient biotechnologically based race which lives arround black wholes. Due to theri pure biotechnological ways their ships don't have warp drives istead they use the Resonance-Black-Whole-Drive.
The RBW-Drive has to be remotely set off by creating resonance with black wholes. They need to be in the exact spot of their arrival at a speciffic time to be able to return.
They have not gone insane, but their mindset is alien to mortal races.

>>60796971
To clarify, the knock impulse would be approximately equal to the recoil of the gun that fired the projectile. For big guns, that's quite a big impulse.

Big battleship-like railguns firing nuclear warhead shells would probably be the weapon of choice for space battles between Et/Tn armoured ships. Plinking at extreme range would have no effect, as each ship can easily absorb and dump the energy it gets from being hit. Lasers would not be very good, as they are inherently inefficient - for every joule you throw at the enemy, you are going to dump two joules into your own systems. In these battles, what would be important is throwing enough energy at the enemy that you overwhelm his armour, causing his systems to start melting, etc. That means close range blasting away with nukes. Missiles are easily countered by EMP weapons, so the nukes have to be lobbed with Big Guns. For a given level of hits per minute, you can either lob them at high velocity and stay further away from the enemy, or you can lob them at a lower velocity and get closer. So different classes of ship (and different factions) would have that choice to make - the aim of a longer-range ship would be to stay at optimal range of a target and score repeated hits on it with accurate railguns, while the aim of a short-range ship would be to tank as it closes the distance and then open up with batteries of big, slow, ugly cannons.

>>60796971
Yea, but humans are not supposed to be the the steampunk race... maybe humans modified the Entropium to have kinetic results as they are easier to handle with just thick shields than building up heat?

Instead the Ussage on Enantropium you describe is used by the Mardians (mermaid species).

We need to give each species a bit of nische.

Humans get WW1/Cold War tanky stuff while Merdians get steampunky steam stuff. Mostly.

>>60797267
I though space combat would work more like this:

Phase 1:
Shooting cutting projectiles to try remove layer of Alice-Plate (solid enentropium)

Phase 2:
Try landing a shot with a high energy balistic wepon in the whole. And try to het trough the thick Tn-plating.

Alternatively try ramming and boarding the enemy vessel.

Alternatively you can just try to shoot the ship with enough firepower to just wreck it with that.

Also, I don't know if you know this, but nukes work by incresing the volume of gases in the atmosphere trough heat. A nuke in Space, especially in this setting would be just an EMP which thanks Tn does nothing from outside the ship.

Nukes also are fairly uselss in ground ocmabt as the tons of delicate aparature controlling detonation usually is broken before reaching low enough over the planet.

>>60797310
Yeah, humans are electropunk. All their technology runs off powerful electrics powered by fusion reactors. Steam is just used as a coolant. Given the physics of the setting, everyone including the biotech species will use Tn electrics and water cooling to an extent, just as every faction in WW2 used steel and diesel. But humans are the most adept at it. Also aesthetics between the races are different.

>>60797418
Assuming very close combat, ramming and boarding are viable tactics, which makes for very interesting battles.
I know how nukes work in space. Despite not setting off much of a fireball, the nuke still dumps its energy in the form of hard radiation, which is absorbed by the Et armour, contributing to the heat building up in the enemy ship's systems.

There should be layers of tungsten or something on top of the cooled Et jacket, so that most of the hard radiation is reflected away. Ship armour will have many such layers, all with a vast high-pressure liquid cooling system.

Cutting projectiles can be easily defeated by having a layer of Tn armour on top of the Et layer. Tn is unbelievably physically strong, but it doesn't fuck with energy like Et does.

Being an energy slugfest is necessary for space battles to last a long time. This allows time for heroic actions, clever decisions, boarding parties, and other story stuff.

>>60797589
I guess you said earlier that Et energy fuckery doesn't work on quarks, so we can say it doesn't work on Tn projectiles either.

So a lance of pure Tn fired from a railgun could pierce a hole in the Et armour layer. It would then be a race to replace the damaged armour before the enemy can send a nuke shell right through the hole to liquify the innards of the ship.

This could be one approach to ship battles, requiring one to specialize in precision and to get quite close to the enemy. Just dumping energy on the enemy until he overheats could be an alternate strategy, beloved of certain factions.

>>60797441
Can't we have Humans and other races use things lsightly differently though?

I agree using water to cool nuclear thingies, but human enantropium should be kinetic while Merdian heat based.

Simply because humans can't handle head past 100C, but they can hande the equivlent of that heat in kinetic energy trough Tn armour. Not to mention there is only that much water you can put into a suit of armor.

Meanwhile the Merdians have managed to mix Enantropium into liquid making it like 1000 times better at cooling than water making the option of using Enantrpium the original andm ost efficient way possible for them.

Humans use a less efficient workaround.

>>60797658
Nah, I'd keep that role to cutting projectiles. Tn-railguns are not quantum-particle based so Alice Plate should still work.

Not to mention there is no realistic way to have people go outi n the middle of a battle and repair this shit... repair would have to be done post battle.

>>60797441
Watercooling in battlesuits would not work because water while it dispenses het well it evaporates at 100C so... yea. The person would be dead before the cooling part would start. It's fien for reactors though.

>>60797753
A quick repair could be done from inside the ship. One more exciting thing for the crew to do.
What is a cutting projectile? There's nothing that can cut through Tn armour. It requires a direct hit with a powerful railgun with Tn tipped projectiles to even pierce it.
The outer layer of the ship's armour would consist of liquid cooled tungsten to reflect hard radiation. The next layer in would be Tn plating containing a mesh of pipes containing coolant with dissolved Et in it. Any kinetic projectile or radiation that gets through the tungsten will lose its energy to the Et, which turns it into heat and a kinetic impulse. So if you want to penetrate the armour, you either have to get rid of the Et layer by penetrating the Tn and making it gush out, leaving a vulnerable hole (this is the cutting solution), or you can pour so much energy into it that the Et reaches temperatures high enough to overload the enemy ship's cooling system.
I think to make the cutting solution work, you have to make Tn projectiles immune to Et energy fuckery (say Et only affects baryonic matter and EM radiation), so that these projectiles don't lose their kinetic energy and clank uselessly against the Tn armour layer. This would also help to make soldiers' small arms actually useful against other soldiers, although the thin penetrator needles wouldn't do much damage, so it balances nicely.

>>60797962
Tn is hard, but Et is not. Et is as sift as rubber. meanwhile Tn-plate on ships can take 2-4 hits from high velocity projectiles.

As such Et is usually used as the outter layer as it perfectly protects from basically anything.

Cutting projectiles are essentially things like flat ended harpoons shuriken-like things ets which trough tn-couate-coild are accelerate to ridiculous speed.

The only weakness of Et is it's physical subber or platic-like consistency as such it can be cut.

Cutting projectiles would need to be launched from speciffic angles to cut away chunks of the Alice Plate as such mobility in ship based warfare is really important.

Because impact-projectiles need to be hit veritcally and cutting ones from the side.

>>60797709
All races can use Et in all ways, but have preferences reflecting different combat philosophies.

>>60797825
Armour cooling systems would work primarily through air-cooled radiators with a water-cooled cycle within the radiators, like cars do. Only in emergencies, such as multiple direct hits, when the cooling system is in danger of overheating, would coolant be vented. It would be the same with spaceships, though their radiators wouldn't be air cooled.

These giant radiators would result in human combat suits looking like a cross between an Iron Man suit and a 50's muscle car. Awesome!

> Building Grimdark Sci-fi Setting!
> The Pulsarbeam is essentially an electro-magnetic canon which instantly burns all circuits. The Pulsarfield creates a field of similar energy so when a beam hits it is evenly dispersed.
Don't we have this already (in form of high-altitude nuclear explosions)?

>>60798079
All such cutting projectiles could be defeated by containing the Et within a thin outer layer of Tn. Et's effects follow an inverse square law, they don't depend on actual contact.

>>60798096
Yeah, we do. In this setting there are two technologies which combined result in delicate electronics being utterly impractical for anything within a few million km of the enemy.

The first is a directed EMP beam, which is basically an extremely powerful coherent radio beam. It is generated with the help of Tenebrium, an incredibly strong, perfectly insulating material used for high energy electric systems.

The second is the Pulsar Beam, a beam of quarks and other esoteric particles, generated from neutronium with the help of ultra heavy duty Tenebrium electronics. A much more advanced and powerful weapon than the EMP beam.

Both of these weapons completely ignore the main defence technologies of the setting, Tenebrium armour combined with a bizarre substance, Entropium, which neutralizes kinetic energy and EM radiation at higher frequencies than infrared (turning the energy into heat). Thus only computers robust enough to be reliably used in military applications are hulking 50's style electromechanical monsters.

The nature of the jump FTL drive of the setting makes hit and run attacks by ships with anti-electronic weaponry very viable, so apart from core worlds, even civilians have to make do with 50s level pre-transistor technology.

I think we need 2 more major factions 6 seems like the perfect number.

I propose:

1. Kearlot - a pecies of sentient robots which uppon arrival of the Pulsar-beam sensed their doom. Thus they reforged their whole species as clockwork based.

A propper Kerlot is made out of gears so microscopic that he's ridicously fragile to kinetic impacts even if their whole system of gears is flooded with Et-gas to abvoid that.

They currently have the most advanced technology, but due to it's size and delicate nature have a hard time deplying it. In land battles usually one Propper Kearlot controlls a horde of much bulkier (but exactly the same looking) clockwork warriors.
Spotting and taking out the True Kearlot is one of the only ways to win. They also have slower reaction time.
Due to the kinetic senssitivity of gears the race focuses on long range space combat.

2. The Coalition - remnants of the races which fought humanity in the first war. They are essentially a conglomerate of dozens of weird alien races anything can be made with them.

The only thing we lack is a diesepunk faction, but I don't know if it's needed. If someone wants to make it a 7th won't be that bad.

Just flsh out the second one.

>>60798122
you could easily destroy it first using projectile weapons and then shoot at it with cutting ones. Not really that useful. Better 2 thick layers than dozens of fragile thin ones.

>>60798092
Hmm... sounds cool. Again I'd the water based coolants to merdians and keep thick kinetic_armour based stuff to humanity.

>>60798342
I guess so. But your cutting projectiles would have to be armour piercing projectiles as well.

Cutting isn't really necessary. As long as the projectile causes the coolant to vent out, the Et will no longer have anywhere to dump its energy, and will itself vaporize and disperse with a few more hits.

>>60798450
The thing is that at least my assumption is that cooling would be a problem for small vehicles and suits and that a ships cooling systems would be that effcient that only a barrage from multiple ships could overload it.

Thus cutting projectiles (which obviously also partly hit) would be the more efficient option.

>>60798307
Clockwork robots are cool, but once the clockwork gets that miniaturized, you're basically talking about metal-based biological entities. Which are also cool.

Let's say they aren't humanoid, but are amorphous in structure and variable in size. They are of unknown origin, but it's possible they evolved in an earlier cycle of galactic life and lay dormant for millions of years. They are machine-parasites, and started by infesting human ships, interfacing directly with the technology and combining it with ancient memories of higher technology to improve it.

Captured and domesticated Kreots are used to make pretty much any piece of technology sentient and autonomous. A Kreot can interface (permanently) with a ship, a house, a flying car, a tank, even a gun. They range in intelligence from animalistic to near Human maximum, and do not naturally age. Thus a human ship or other technological item which has been animated by a Kreot, can have ancient memories passed down the generations and its own personality.

>>60798496
Dumping energy is surprisingly hard in space. Radiative cooling is not very fast, though it gets faster with the third power of temperature. Thus, in combat, a ship will warm up to optimal operating temperature as it takes hits. At operating temperature, the hull of the ship and its radiators will be glowing with 2000 degree temperatures, while the inner decks containing delicate crew and machinery will be insulated and cooled by a separate cooling cycle.

>>60798652
That is a cool idea I'd have them still have their origin with the rise of the humans though where they decided to reengineer theselves.

But them infecting ships id gold. That might be a survival strategy or a way of reverse-engineering technology from other races.

Ships which have Kreot in them perform better than any other, but seem to always start breaking down when facing other Kreaot.

I'm against them being an ancient reawakened race because that's to close to Necrons XD
Them having purpusfully redegned themselves to be like that in the post-microchip era makes more sense.

>>60798709
Cool so we have a really intricate space combat system no where:
- cooling
- positioning
- weapon type (impact projectile. cutting projectile, energybeam)
- armor type

Having all of these play an intrisic role will be very interesting and will create a resemblence of "fake realism" in the complexity of comat in space.

>>60798709
>>60798496
You are also underestimating the amount of energy that Tn-electric nuclear powered systems could pump out. Let alone if nuclear warheads are used as standard projectiles. The problem is too much destructive energy being flung around for cooling systems to cope with, not too little.

>>60776206
>all miniaturization had to be undone and electronics had to become as bulky as the 1950's.

No. You'll have to do better than that.

>>60798777
Yeah, I've actually never thought this hard about space combat. I think this is good.
>>60798734
>Ships which have Kreot in them perform better than any other, but seem to always start breaking down when facing other Kreaot.
That would imply that the kreot in the human ship turned traitor. That could happen, but it would be extraordinary, maybe part of the plot of a story in the setting. Most human-allied and owned kreot would be genuinely human allied.

We could make them ancient awakened species without being necron-like by saying they were always machine-parasites. They evolved from a subversion weapon made by an ancient forgotten civilization. They're nowhere near Necrons' power level or importance to the universe, but are kind of quirky.

>>60798816
What do you mean?

>>60799037
No I thought of them more like.

They were your run-of-the-mill sentient robots trying to constantly expand blah, blah robot supremacy.

They were purely circuit based. When the Humans invented the Pulsarbeam that threated their entire existance. So they reinvented their whole technological basis.

The Kreot ship-spirits might have been a spy-type model deignd to infltrate other races and steal their technology.

The machines would have no reason to invent a model which would be tray them. Even if it's animalistic in intelligence it would still be instincitvely aligned with it's own.

There also would have been no reason for major clock-work technology being even created pre Pulsarbeam-era. We already have the Bioweapon guys as the ancient evil so that's enough.

>>60799037
I think at least some kreot should be intelligent enough to learn to speak, and have real human-level personalities. (Maybe personalities imprinted from humans?)

I think kreot-animated technology should be fairly rare, used only by upper classes. Thus for example a Baron or famous warrior would wield a legendary gun, generations old, which has a mind of its own and aims itself with incredible accuracy.

>>60799139
I think that would make sense, but only if the Kret itself does not know it is a Kreot and it still by insticnt would protect it's own.

This is somewhat of a grimdark setting so we can't just hav a nice do-gooder species.

The Kreot-sybiots should also not be exclussive to humans, but exist within all other factions. (except the bioguys and space whalers) I guess.

The Upper class people should also not know themselves that what they posess is a Kreot. Many people in the setting are backwards and even those who don't worship the Computation Worlds as such they might see it as some sort of blessing.

>>60799098
Problem with robot civilizations is that they're OP
If the kreot have the capability and intelligence to literally reengineer themselves on an entirely new basis then they should be ruling the galaxy by now.

>>60799203
Oh, they're not dogooders. A captured kreot-infested ship is turned into useful sentiences for human machines by slicing up the amorphous kreot body inside and reconditioning each slice to have an allegiance to its owner.

I guess before sleep I'll give some love to the Mobiates the crazy Space Whale riding pirates.

The Mobiates are a bellow average sentient race. Still they can and o usually speak in very eloquent ways pretending to either be in film theater or other entertainment shows.

The Mobiates lack any sense of of logic or mathematics. They center their lifes on providing the best possible entertainment for an imaginary creature they belive is watching them.

It's unknown how they came to be. Maybe they evolved from the parasites of the Mobius Beluga or somehow differently tamed the giant beast.

The Mobiates themselves have no sense of technology. They keep slaves and slave planets to make it for them and then they attach it to their Space Whale.

The Mobiates have been pirates of the galaxy since time immemorial. Troughout the ages of high technology ruling they were nothing more than an inconvenience, but the decay of the oncem ighty empires and their armadas changed them into a threat to be reconded with.

They are exceedingly tough being able to survive hours in the vacuum of space and personally don't wear any armour having Tn and Et entrenched in their biology.

Their fleet tactics consist of having ther huge-ass space whale pop out of theri pocked dimmension repeatedly trying to bite the opponents ship or ramm it while they use their stolen weak gunns to shoot at it.

Once it's considered possible they will try to board the ship.

The Mobius Beluga is an animal and often retreats pretty quickly if it believe a fight to not be worthwhile and too damaging. That's the one thing the Mobiates hate about ther gargantuan host.

>>60799203
I don't like the idea of kreot being a hivemind, it's an overplayed trope as well as being OP. Let's say each infected ship develops into a single kreot intelligence, capable of replicating that specific ship given the right materials, and sometimes improving it (based on ancient memories).

>>60799412
Cool, I'm going to bed too. I'll give some thought to the humans.

We can start a new thread to flesh out the factions, history, "geography". But I'm glad we agreed (more or less) on a FTL system, space combat and the setting's scientific basics.

>>60799326
The problem is that was not the original plant.

The original idea was that they are clockwork based. Having come to the conclussion that clockwork-technology is the only one which will let them keep their civilisation intact.

What could they have used? Biotechnology they didn't understand? Steam power? (no potential)? Way to huge, ineffciient and bulky circuits? etc...etc...

Essentilly clockwork seemed to be the only option which would allow for a sufficnet level of miniaturisation while being save.

Very small cogs being the basis of them means though that they are ridicously fragile. Without Et-gas filling their body a gust of wind would desroy the apparature. With Et-gas a strong wound would.

Thus in combat the propper members of the species are very sparce like 1 in a 1000 while essentially semi-autonomous brainless puppets are controlled by them.

And they would be overpowered if not that if you get the leaders the puppets stop functioning too.

The ships also if you manage too get past the deffences the ships are easily destroyed. Making them focus on long-range combat.

They were forced to choose clockwork technology inspite of being the infferior option they didn't choose it because they wanted.

Clockwork technology is very fragile because all cogs base of each other so one cog being moved or desroyed endagers the whole system.

>>60799434
Yea I don't want them to be hiveminded either more like dislocated intelligences being able to switch bodies.

All I want to give them is some sort of programm implemented by their creators which makes them not attack their own.

>>60799555
Or at least try too, (it's notl ike they controll the ship) mainly because it just makes sense.

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>>60799495
We have to think of a name for the setting. How about Wheels of Progress after 1900-1910 scientific optimism? Kind of like a Bioshock vibe