Bay 12 Games Forum

Shouldn't be too much of a problem. They'd only be spread out on turn 1. By turn 2, we can leave the groundpounders on the planet and consolidate.

Structured Webbing

Webbing, despite it's enormous importance in modern day society and warfare, is still abadly understood thing. In fact, untill recently no scientist or engineer had ever seen a web in it's original state. The workers who gathered them in the deptha below did see them, of course, but they were either convicts or insane. In either case, they had nothing important to say.

Recent discoveries from a classified source have shook things up, however. We've seen an actusl web, and we've figured out that not all silk is identical. Instead, a web is an intricate structure of many different kinds of silk, each with their own specific purpose. Harvesting strands, that take the aether from the air, conduit strands, that gather and spread it through the web, and structural strands, that keep the entire thing from collapsing.

By paying attention to which bit of silk we attach where, we can replicate this structurr in our own webbing, creating a stronger and more efficient web.

Fleet Command-Unbound

A hundred years ago, a satellite detected an object under the sand. It was our colony ship, and we may have been a little bit careless when parking it. Deep within it was an object that could change our history forever, as well as the colony missions full entertainment database. The former has been lost to time, but the later inspires us to this day.

Controlling a fleet is an extremely complicated task. The chaos of battle, with hundreds of not thousands of automated fighters and ships reporting in is impossible to effectively transmit using any known interface. The only logical solution is a full direct link. The Unbound command suite fully integrates the commander with his/her ship using advanced cybernetics and a direct brain interface. With an Unbound interface, one does not merely command the fleet. Once becomes fleet command.

We do not expect to have any negative or psychological consequences.

Artificial Composite Intelligence

With most of our fleet under full or partial automation, it makes sense to leave most of the business of fleet command to our automated systems as well. Information exchange, low level tactics and target prioritization can all be perfectly handled by automated systems. The trouble is effectively integrating this information in a consistent manner.

The Solution is ACI, a dynamic artificial intelligence that is created by combining the computing resources of all the ships in the fleet into a single composite overmind. As a distributed intelligence, it is present in all ships, and can thus take actions over the entire fleet.

In order to keep the composite consistent however,  frequent high volume communications is required. For that reason, there's an ACI command node needs to be included in one of the ships. This node consists out of an artificial intelligence core, a human monitoring system, and more importantly a large array of miniature bore drives. These drives are used to deploy and retrieve transmissions and messaging drones, keeping the mindstate of the AI consistent even at great distances.


Bore Overdrive Protocol

Experience from the Bore shield has thought us how to operate bore drives at high power for limited span of time. We have know applied that experience to a somewhat modified bore drive. By selectively reinforcing systems, and increase the available power, we can sustain the overloaded performance for significant amounts of time (if proper preparations are made). We hope that this will allow our bore drive to operate at greater speed in the strategic if not tactical sense.

Assuming Direct Control

The Honey drone is good at repairing simple systems, but more complex tasks are so far beyond it. However, with a secure and stable link between the bee drone and the main computer, we can use it's vastly greater power for diagnostics and repair of even the most complex systems.

Remora Repair Drone

Someone turned the engineering entertainment system yo the wrong channel. The results are peculiar but eorthwhile.

The Remora repair drone is a small, flat drone that can suction itself to the outside of ships to perform critical repairs in flight with it's build in toolset. It can also suction itself to interior walls, floors and ceiling to repair internal systems. In an emergency, it can even suction itself to an intrudor, where it'll rearrange their internal irgans untill they cease to be a threat.

Gravitational Metamaterials

Interference with drive technology is a serious concern to us. Hence, gravitational metamaterials. These materials take gravitational waves that could interfere with drive technology, and bend them around the drive generator. This dramatically reduces interference, allowing for easier calculations and more accurate results, as well as making it tremendousy harder to interfere with the drives.

I'm not sure I like the aluminum idea. Trying to create a second world war alloy in 1945 is something that seems like it would explode in our face.

It may be better to try and go for duralumin, which was invented in 1903.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duralumin

We really need to remember to give the North contingency orders.

Also, the enemy appears to be seriously outdevelopping us.