Bay 12 Games Forum

You know, having run the numbers it's not inconceivable that the Tau of all races could seriously attempt intergalactic travel. Their ether drives, while slower than the Imperial warp drives, travel at a consistent speed in the interstices between the Warp and real space, and so would not operate differently in the presumably calmer extragalactic Warp. Nor do they need the Astronomican or the Webway.

Using the 2nd Ed. Imperial Guard codex's average of 400 ly/day (or rather, 10,000 ly/ 10-40 days),  a Tau ship running at the listed 1/5th speed could reach the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy in just over 2.5 years, the Magellanic Clouds in 5-7, and Andromeda in 68. That last one is admittedly longer than the Tau lifespan, but between the Ethereals' unifying effect and the Tau's stasis capability we might expect them to avoid the Three Generations Problem and so keep the fleet running that long.

So I'm fairly new to this, but what's the best way to avoid overheating? I've been using mostly copious amounts of farm tiles to establish Liceloaf as my primary diet, but they start overheating around cycle 100 and the problem keeps escalating. I broke open a cold biome for Wheezewort and to try and route chilled hydrogen pipes through my base (I think that's what some other people recommended? Or did I get that wrong...), but that's barely making a dent in my temperature problems. I suspect it has to do with a a cool steam geyser that I've tapped into since my starter sources are running low, but would funneling it via insulated pipes into an insulated cistern be enough to give everybody heat stroke?

Check the temperature in your hydrogen return pipes; if your adventures in gas cooling went anything like mine, it has probably long since reached ambient temperature. Gas pipes' 1 kg/s flow rate effectively limits what you can do with gas cooling, particularly at -30 C or so like you've probably got in your frozen biome. Liquid cooling, by contrast, is working with 10x the flow rate, and plain water is perfectly suitable for the kind of temperatures you want. (Piping the return water into a room full of hydrogen and wheezeworts is, provided it doesn't melt, a good way to cool it down, though.)

In general, though, the best way to cool your base in the early game is to control heat generation and leakage in from the surrounding biomes in the first place, along with passive cooling (read: put temperature-insensitive things in upper rooms) so that the heat you do get is contained. Once you get into the midgame you can consider doing things like aquatuner/sieve loops to just eliminate a lot of process heat or maybe finding an anti-entropy thermo nullifier (AETN), and there are some heat-negative power plant designs out there -- although for whole-base cooling to 20 C, a self-powered oxygen module (SPOM) is one of the easiest and most reliable ways to go provided you can keep the pressure in the base down.

In the short term, have you considered piping your geyser water through your frozen biome to cool it? You could even drip it onto (clean) ice, if you want.

The real answer is probably it sounds cooler and neither Imperium nor writers give a single flying fuck.

Yep: handwaving. It's a well-worn handwave with which to reconcile go-almost-anywhere FTL with the idea of there being chokepoints to defend and thus a reason for static defenses and dramatic races to the point and so forth.

I suspect the prescriptive jump points mentioned in the Battlefleet Gothic rule book as being marked out by beacons in civilized systems may have evolved into the descriptive Mandeville Points of The Path of Heaven.

I think I already lamplit that this is what the imperium would have to do.  (stop outside the denial of service area, then cruise in on standard space engines.)

However,  that makes their presence known in the system long before they can arrive at their intended destination.  That gives plenty of time to organize a coordinated repulsive bombardment operation.

Only to the generators themselves, though. You're covering surface area, not volume -- which incidentally, still puts you at a massive disadvantage relative to your attackers, who need only make one hole -- so the distance they have to cross sublight is only the radius of effect of the generators, at which point they can reenter warp. And, again, these are surprisingly fast ships . If you'd care to specify a radius for your network I can give you a median trip time to Earth.

Quote from: Trekkin on December 05, 2018, 04:06:16 pm

Those ships run on plasma fuel gathered from blue-white stars

This is the second time I've seen a comment like this and I don't think I got an answer last time, but this is canonical?  The Imperium harvests plasma from stars instead of making it on demand by fusion?  I always assumed that "plasma generators" were just a fancy term for fusion generators.

Per the description of Goliath Factory Ships "scoop[ing] the plasma" from stars, it appears so. Apparently their plasma uses "photonic hydrogen" or other "base molecules" reduced from again unspecified "rare elements" (apparently you can extract whole molecules from elements, who knew) and suspended already in a plasma state, which they can either manufacture from unspecified "ores" or gather from stars, but the former process evidently requires enough energy to make it uneconomical to use part of the resultant plasma to fuel the rest of the conversion.

What does "daemonifuge" mean? It's both the name of a book and the section in Enemies Beyond that covers equipment and gear and such.

Quote from: Dorsidwarf on May 05, 2018, 07:53:37 am

Quote from: Andres on May 05, 2018, 01:42:46 am

What does daemonifuge mean? It's both Ephrael Stern's title and the name of the section in DH2E: Enemies Beyond covering wargear.

I dont know why its the name of the wargear section, but if I remember correctly the demonifuge was a horrifying amalgation of hideously malformed Sister prisoners kept alive by chaos powers that empowered Ephrael "Where are you hiding the protein" Stern, enabling her to escape her chaos captors

etymololigically (fuck), its probbably a simple derivation of "demon" and "centrifuge"

Amusing as that image is (the daemon centrifuge, not the amalgamation), it's probably got more to do with -fuge being from the Latin fugāre, meaning to drive away, expel, or run off.

"Thing for expelling daemons" makes sense for a wargear chapter, I think.

How many times do you need to ask this question?

I also find it hilarious that the Emps made space marines so humanity would have these power armoured supersoldiers, but because they were reliant on humanity for continued existence they wouldn't rebel. Then they do the worst rebellion the Imperium had ever experienced and ruin everything for the next 10,000 years.
The SOB meanwhile are just regular humans in power armour. Not only do they do the same job without augmentation as the space marines, but they also didn't instantly become team killing fucktards despite having none of the biological limitations / dependencies of space marines.
Space marines suck, the Emperor should have just made SOB legions from the start

Oh, the Sisters of Battle would have done a fine job conquering and even ruling the Imperium, but that was not what the Emperor wanted. Building the Imperium was what the little people did with the rubble left behind from his galaxy-spanning genocide spree, because he was a bloodthirsty monster. Whether or not he actually was Alexander the Great, he certainly had the ego to see himself as an Alexander-like figure and therefore to view Alexander's troops' refusal to conquer India, however apocryphal, as a cautionary tale: men would eventually grow weary of war.

Space Marines are not men. They have their humanity cut out to make room for more organs, and the Primarchs are doubly far removed. They do not grow too old to fight, and have no desire to do anything else -- reinforced, in extremis, by all those biological dependencies. Nor are they even designed to do the calmer parts of war. Logistics is what serfs are for.

Plan A was to purify the galaxy at the head of a band of superhuman weapons who'd laud his victories, share in his bloodshed and regard him as their literal father to be adulated even for genocide. Plan B was to replace those original twenty bros with smaller, less superhuman mini-bros, but to have lots and lots of them to cheer him on to make up for it. Plan B.2 involved the human-built Webway, and I am still not entirely convinced that its collapse and the subsequent never-ending battle on Terra was entirely an accident.

I am very seriously questioning your attempt at using an entirely fanciful munition (8.25mm caseless, which you are trying to conflate to 8mm mauser) as a point of reference tho'.  There is no real world analog to that munition and we do not have adequate data to infer anything.

Well, I think we can take a different approach using Dark Heresy, which gives us real-world numbers to work from in the form of ranges and the mass of autogun bullets -- which, in turn, lets us put an upper bound on the muzzle energy of the Agipinaa Type-II pattern Autogun, explicitly described as being equivalent to a lasgun. One bullet is ten grams, so there's no way for the muzzle energy to exceed 0.5 * 0.01 kg * ( 825 m/s )^2 = 3403 J. If we assume that equivalent "stopping power" and an identical damage rating at almost the same range means about the same amount of muzzle energy, that gives us an upper bound on lasgun power output.