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[Rockeater]

For me, one of the draws for this game is that it doesn't have standard Sensei-ish logistics. I like having to think about more than just iteration X+1 of whatever sub-race the game devolves into (looking at you ICAR and your fighters/radar/missiles), and having to judge where to deploy units and what to give them.

Potential ways we could simplify, whilst keeping the logistics I personally like and promoting the "ships are special" deal, could be:

- GalRace style, where ground combat designs are never as specific as a single weapon, instead being while regiments and their default gear, plus specialist attachments

- Simplifying costs to generic PP,  instead of having separate Ground and Space PP

- Having maintainence costs for units, rather than (essentially) buying them every turn. This will encourage teams to pull back damaged units, as paying upkeep whilst it is repaired would be preferable to buying it again

+1 to that, couldn't say it better

[Madman198237]

So here's one option I briefly mentioned:

Work on removing the logistics system for ground units and their transportation. Not only does this incentivize and make easier the deployment of new ground equipment, but it spares me from the least fun bits of logistics and just generally removes the nuisance, for me anyway, of having a logistics system.

Obviously, how good your transportation was would still matter, and in fact any upgrades to ITCs and their durability would matter MORE since they'd now be sticking close to a planet to aid surface transportation whenever possible, i.e. doing what the Network was trying to do with their ITCs (which is a default behavior for an ITC orbiting a planet with your troops on it, if I hadn't made it clear enough previously) before the Technate's fleet showed up. They'd be more likely to come under fire and get destroyed as a result, but you would also see more help from them unless the enemy completely controls an orbit.

You would have a revamped strategy phase that involves only moving combat units. You'd be able to give orders like "defend, give ground" etc. to ground troops just like previously. I like the *idea* of designing ground unit types, so I'll leave it up as an option, but I feel like there's going to be some problems with it that I'm not remembering or thinking of right now, so I'll leave it up to you guys to help pick it apart.


I'm not certain of how to go about altering the logistics system with ships, or indeed if I should even bother. Ideas?

[TricMagic]

Be nice if we did not have that Sub-version of TC bottlenecking us.

[Madman198237]

Turn Six Combat Phase

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Alright well this is continuing apace. We're actually a mere month away from the one-year anniversary of us all starting this rapidly moving trainwreck and the end is nowhere in sight, leading me with some questions, chief among them "What did I sign my life away to?".

Another question is for you: What is the dark side of your nations? This contest will award the winner with a Research Credit (roll 3d4 on a design and take the highest two rolls). Loser gets the same thing but for a revision as a compensation prize assuming they have a submission. This contest will conclude in the NEXT BATTLE REPORT, and I'll accept any submissions that your team votes to be "true", i.e. you guys need to agree on what your problem(s) are before they become canon. I will hopefully be using the results as a springboard to finally give you more than logistical details on your own threads' BRs, as I should have previously.

And, the answer to the logistics question appears to be "keep it as is for fear of the massive pain that changing it would be", which is unfortunate. Anyway, from this point on the only things that get "Obsolete" tags or an equivalent are going to be ships. Upgrades to preexisting equipment (that doesn't change the cost) will be automagically deployed to ground troops. Same deal with Cheap equipment.
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In Orbit Over Planet E
One Chord departs early on in the season. Shortly thereafter, ITC-02-LIFT "Trade Surplus" arrives, finding a Chord and a Degree waiting for it. It turns and begins to adjust its orbit for deep space, but facing two faster ships, one of which is armed with long-ranged missiles, it stands no chance. The first volley of missiles arrow in to the defenseless ship and detonate outside in a burst of high-powered laser light, before a few meters inside the ship a bulkhead is thrown as if punched by an angry god, destroying a (luckily unoccupied) barracks section completely, and causing shrapnel damage to cut off internal communications to the docked LIFT shuttles. More volleys follow and the Chord closes in to bake the ship with lasers, and Trade Surplus is Destroyed in action.

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In Orbit Over Planet F
Three Network Logos ships wait here: "Uninvited Guest", "Attitude Adjuster", and "Zero Credibility". Their waiting is for nothing, however, as nothing happens until late in the season when a Network ITC, "Prime Mover", arrives over the planet. Despite the fact that the warships have nothing to do, their ships do score extra coolness points with the Technate soldiers on the planet below when it is realized they have real names, however. The Technate doesn't have cool names, and their soldiers are unhappy with this situation. The Prime Mover then deploys troops to the surface, and the Technate soldiers go back to hating all Network ships with a passion.

The Surface of Planet F
Unfortunately for the Network's daring assault, they've deployed a single unit without any of their new air support to the planet below, which is held by two Technate units. No beachhead is established and no success is had in the bloody fighting. Technate gyrojets are still superior in accuracy at Long range and mildly guided (and weak) at Medium range and they still use machine pistols at close range. Network Trephines are still deadly at any range and dominate Medium range. However, the Network does deploy a new mortar/direct-fire grenadeish launcher called the "Dozer". It uses a low-velocity railgun system and its high explosive shells are used to devastating effect against Technate forces who try to close the range. But it can't save the Network from being outnumbered two to one, and the battle is concluded rapidly without too much loss on either side as the Network retreats back to their shuttles and into space.

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In Orbit Over Planet D
A Damaged Chord makes its hasty retreat from the planet, while the two Degrees remain. A Network ITC, the "Trade Surplus", departs towards E, but the other ITC, the "Cargo Cult" remains, lurking high above the planet, avoiding any attempts to reach it made by the two Degrees but unable to do anything for its troops on the ground. The Degrees, having no orders, are not very aggressive with their pursuit attempts, preferring to stay and guard the planet against Network reinforcements. Shortly later, a friendly Chord comes in from E...and three Network ships arrow in, in formation, from the direction of C.

"No More Mr Nice Guy", "Gunboat Diplomat", and "Of Course I Still Love You" head straight for the Technate ships with orders to engage. The Technate ships, without any real orders for the situation, merely deploy for combat. Cargo Cult remains high above, waiting for someone to achieve victory. New sensor clusters and different radar dishes adorn the Network warships, whereas the Technate ships look much the same.

The Chord turns to face the enemies and moves away from the Degrees to give them some distance. A Degree is not a very good warship if one needs to flee an enemy, as they are not the fastest of ships, so they need to start from their maximum range to fight effectively. These Logos....Logoses? Logosi? Screw you, MoP. Anyway, the plural Logos warships are definitely maneuvering slower than regular ones. The reason for the changes to sensors and maneuvering become clear as the range closes, as the missiles that are lobbed at the formation of Logos ships are swatted out of the sky with highly accurate (though massively overpowered for the job) railgun fire, nine railguns firing against four slow missile launchers, and winning. The Chord gets into range, rakes laser fire over the Logos...and has little effective. The new Thermal Defense Citadel has turned the Logos from a fast-moving glass cannon to a solid all-arounder with much better defense against lasers and similar weapons, though it's still way on the light end of warships that the two nations could build. The Chord has the bulk to sustain hits, but its armament is too small for its size and lacks the bite of the Network's excellent railguns, leaving Chord #3 little choice but to keep trying while getting blasted away piece by piece. Their new targeting system, Artemis (no I will not be including the "3" you replaced that "e" with, heathens) is able to track the Chord perfectly and coordinated fire rips it apart in record time, with "No More Mister Nice Guy", itself Lightly Damaged, breaking formation to finish it off as the other turn speed towards the now rapidly retreating Degree missile corvettes. Chord #3 is Destroyed, and the Degrees haven't escaped yet.

They are, however, making a pretty good job of running away. It was obvious early on that the Chord was going to lose, and three against two is only a good fight if you're one of the three, so the Degrees just keep running, and use their missiles to force the Network to use railgun shots as defensive measures, instead of trying for shots at the retreating ships. The Network ships are under orders to destroy all Technate shipping, and are much more aggressive with their pursuit than the Technate ships were earlier, and as a result both Technate ships are Damaged before escaping.

A Technate ITC comes in later, but having already been warned of the destruction by the retreated Degrees it stays far away from the planet and is not intercepted.

The Surface of Planet D
The Network continues their relentless march across the surface. They outnumber the Technate defenders, they have air support, and they have a wider variety of weapons. Granted, the air support is mostly important as a transportation element, but it can also rain rifle fire from above quite effectively, while being resistant to Technate return fire. Late in the season, Network shuttles return to move troops across the continents and islands of this water-filled world, and the battle comes to a bloody finish. Both sides are exhausted, but the Technate's final defensive positions couldn't hold out against the Network's superior numbers, superior assortment of weapons, and superior vehicle availability (that being, "any available vehicles").

Control of Planet D: 10 Network - 0 Technate


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Spoiler: Map (click to show/hide)

Planetary Contents:
1 & 2: Earthlike planets just as you’d expect. Take your opponent’s homeworld to win, lose yours and you die.
A: Riddled with caves and with a mineral-rich crust, this airless world is ideal for the production of spacecraft components. 1 GPP, 3 SPP.
B: A volcanic world with a caustic atmosphere and lava flows on the surface, B is full of minerals that can be easily acquired…if you can deal with the, quite literal, heat. 3 GPP, 1 SPP.
C: Icy, barren, rather flat in most regions. It has rather a lot of those things humans need to live sitting on and under its airless surface. 3 GPP, 3 SPP.
D: A surface-wide ocean is the defining trait of this planet, providing an interesting combat environment and also plenty of interesting life forms that can be studied….if you can build a big enough boat to catch one, anyway. 4 GPP, 2 SPP.
E: Another Earthlike planet, ideal for habitation….or, y’know, fighting a good old fashioned war over! 4 GPP, 4 SPP.
F: A world of highlands and mountains, the lower parts of the planet are filled with most of the planet's already scarce water. However, the mountainous regions have high mineral contents and plenty of good spacecraft launch sites above the majority of the atmosphere. 2 GPP, 4 SPP.
G: Deserts cover the surface of this planet. Deserts made, in fact, of a curious sand with abnormally high metal and mineral contents. It has an atmosphere that serves to stir up the sands into occasional sandstorms. 3 GPP, 3 SPP.
H: An airless, small rock in space, H is heavily cratered and not a great place to live. Good place to build spacecraft, though. 1 GPP, 3 SPP.
I: A world covered in wide stretches of windswept terrain covered in something that we’re going to call grass, I is ideal for large-scale industrial activity. Nobody cares if you do irreparable damage to a huge tract of grasslands here, after all, there are a hundred more huge tracts of pristine grasslands you haven’t ruined yet. 3 GPP, 1 SPP.

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[Madman198237]

Turn Seven Combat Phase

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In Orbit Over Planet D
The three Technate ships, an ITC and two damaged Degrees, flee towards G. They are pursued by all three burned and battered Network warships immediately, with the Network ITC "Cargo Cult" remaining behind to collect troops from the planet's surface before it, too, heads for G.

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In Orbit Over Planet E
The two Chords and one Degree present here depart, heading for Planet F. Network forces below breathe a sigh of relief.

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In Orbit Over Planet F
Three Network Logos ships, "Uninvited Guest", "Attitude Adjuster", and "Zero Credibility", depart for Planet G, nearly crossing paths with a massive ship and an ITC coming from Planet G. The Technate knows they're coming. The Network ITC present, "Prime Mover", likewise departs for G.

Two Chords, a Degree, an ITC, and the massive Technate ship arrive late in the season. The new Technate ship, observed during the transfer, is a long armored tube capped with armored spheres, surrounded by cargo blocks, covered in what appear to be armed variants of the standard ITC shuttles. Its maneuvering is sluggish. These vessels stay long enough to deploy something to the planet's surface, before all turning around and proceeding back towards G.

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In Orbit Over Planet G
Seven Network ships arrive over the planet just barely behind the survivors of the action at D last turn. The Technate ITC is throwing off shuttles like crazy as it tries to evacuate at least part of its complement to the surface below during its slingshot maneuver. Warned by the large ships that the Network's forces passed by on their way from F, the two Degrees and the ITC haven't even slowed down and are simply continuing away. The ITC even abandons its shuttles, not staying close enough to the planet to pick them back up. They descend to the surface and prepare to act as transport craft until they run out of fuel.

Shortly afterwards the Network ITC begins offloading troops to the surface, the ground offensive begins. Late in the season another Network ITC arrives, and starts moving towards the planet to unload troops.

It is interrupted, however, by alerts from the patrolling fleet of Logoses. Logosi. Y'know what, maybe five Logoseses should spontaneously explode so I only have to talk about one. Or maybe they'll all combine into one mega-Logos with little Logos arms and legs. The Network armada is patrolling the outer edges of the system in pairs, harassing the two damaged Degree missile corvettes and the ITC, which have wisely scattered on several very different distant orbits to force the Network forces to split up, hoping they'll make a mistake that will allow their allies to take them out piecemeal. The six Logeese can't afford to stop covering any of the Technate ships but also can't force a confrontation, because any move they make towards them always gives the Technate forces ample time to shift their orbit and be nowhere near the intended intercept point. There is a reason that, when you want to stay out of a fight, you stay out in a really high-altitude orbit.

The alert, however, ends the game of cat-and-mouse, as more Technate ships come in from the direction of F. Two Chords, another Degree, an ITC, and the massive ship. All six Logeis regroup and prepare to engage the new group before they can meet up with the Technate assets already in high orbit. This does not go well.

All six Logos hurtle towards the new contacts grouped around the massive cylinder with the armed shuttles. Handfuls of missiles start streaking forwards from the lone Degree, then railgun rounds start screaming through the gaps in the formation. As the range comes down, hits are scored on the massive ship, the Logosi clearly aiming for the easiest target while at extreme range. The rounds have minimal effect, the armored tube is resistant to all their fire. The Chords start to reply with lasers, then the handful of shuttles close enough to the front of the new warship start to fire back with their single individual lasers. The Logos begin to heat up, laser fire quickly focusing in on the damaged ones. The damaged ones are also the newest, and it's their advanced fire controls tasked with shooting down the trickle of missiles coming from the Degree. While easy enough to do with so many ships present, it's still a serious reduction in their firepower to be distracted like this, and it shows. Without fear of so many railgun rounds the Chords are not maneuvering as much and several sections of "Gunboat Diplomat" and "No More Mister Nice Guy" are starting to glow red.

They're not entirely without success, however. At least one of the shuttles on the super-ITC is no longer returning fire and the Degree is forced to duck back closer to the trailing ITC to avoid some accurate railgun fire. By and large, though, most shots are hitting the big combatant...and doing very little to it. The shuttles are unarmored but to ask for the Logos to go picking off individual shuttles is more than they're capable of at this range. So they force the issue, and close the range, before the other two Degrees can rendezvous and tilt the odds further. The range comes down to a knife fight and two Logos break off to deal with the Degree, two go for the Chords, and two press the assault on the large ship, the words "Kaden's Bravery" now visible on the hull.

The seven ships in the middle devolve into a furious melee around the bulk of Kaden's Bravery. "Of Course I Still Love You" and "Zero Credibility" face off against the Chords, but rapidly find themselves overmatched by the combined fire of the transport's shuttles and the Chords they were pursuing, and use their barely-superior maneuverability, weighed down by armor they were never meant to carry, to start using Kaden's Bravery as a shield against the two Chords, systematically destroying shuttles or their weapons. With every shuttle destroyed the main ship loses some acceleration, clearly the shuttles must be augmenting its thrust. The two Logose attacking the transport, "Attitude Adjuster" and "Uninvited Guest", find it trivial to slip into its aft arc, where few shuttles' guns can fire at it, and start systematically chewing through the armored sphere protecting the ship's large reactor assembly and main aft reactionless drive array. The ship might be masquerading as a warship but it is still a transport, with all the ungainliness and total lack of maneuverability that implies. What's worse, this one is covered in extremely heavy armor. However, as soon as OCISLY and Zero Credibility go defensive, the two Chords sweep around to the tail of their compatriot and Uninvited Guest & co. rapidly decide that it may be better to invite themselves to some other part of the battle, and likewise start playing a game of heavily armed cat-and-mouse around the transport, demolishing weapons and trying to get through the tough armor with little success.

The Degree and ITC fall back further and further as Gunboat Diplomat and No More Mister Nice Guy try and get past the furious melee between them, eventually succeeding when the Chords are forced to pursue Uninvited Guest and Attitude Adjuster. Laser fire from the many shuttles across Kaden's Bravery's surface scorched the two ships but even with their previous injuries they're still fast enough to escape without being crippled, and they make for the rapidly retreating ITC and Degree. It takes them some time to catch up, but eventually they do...only to discover that it was, in fact, a trap. The two damaged Degrees already in-system had been racing towards the ITC and undamaged Degree, and now the two Legos find themselves under missile attack from a numerically superior foe. Missiles detonate outside ships in flashes of laser fire, punching in pieces of the Logeses without ever breaking through their (Admittedly limited) outer armor, destroying anything not contained within the inner thermal defense citadels and putting massive holes even in that. Even with Artemis asking two ships to fight six incoming missiles with six railguns isn't an even fight, and the fact that the enemies are even willing to use their empty ITC as a sort of makeshift cover between volleys makes it exceedingly difficult to kill them. Degree #2, though, doesn't quite get far enough behind the ITC, and a round goes end-to-end on the ship, disintegrating partway through putting a thousand shrapnel holes in the back of the ship, killing it outright. Gunboat Diplomat and No More Mister Nice Guy suffer terrible internal wounds before eventually giving up, though their return fire has fully Crippled Degree-01 and Badly Damaged Degree-03, which was formerly undamaged. No More Mister Nice Guy is Badly Damaged and Gunboat Diplomat took a Crippling hit to the engines trying to press to close range. All ships involved from this side action retire from the fight, unable to contribute to the vicious action around Kaden's Bravery and not wiling to get into another fight near the planet to try and gain orbital superiority.

Over at the planet, there is a sort of standoff as three, soon to be four, ITCs all just kind of hang around the planet deploying troops and looking at each other funny. The Technate ITC that was hanging around has headed back to the planet to offload the rest of its contingent, and the other Technate ITC is heading there now to help move troops around the surface. Both Network ITCs are now likewise unloading troops or moving them around the surface, while the warships blow each other to bits somewhere else.

Back around Kaden's Bravery, seven ships are trying their best to murder each other while playing cat and mouse across the surface of a ship that functionally can't maneuver on a combat timescale. Kaden's Bravery has been mostly defanged by the continued fighting but its armored core is still nearly undamaged. The Technate's two Chords are both suffering from the badly unequal fight, but Attitude Adjuster has dropped behind, Crippled and unable to keep up with the ships still heading for the planet. Uninvited Guest manages to slip free of the Chords' pursuit, leaving them to batter Of Course I Still Love You and Zero Credibility in the continued fight. Uninvited Guest makes for the Bravery's aft once again, and this time has enough time to put accurate fire into the armored sphere at point-blank range before a pair of angry Chords comes back to evict it once more. This time, Uninvited Guest doesn't fare quite so well and is reduced to a molten wreck before it can attempt escape, the last remaining guns of Kaden's Bravery bringing it down. However, the Bravery is losing what's left of its acceleration after receiving several accurate railgun rounds into its aft drive array, and its reactor power output is a little unstable after the laser arrays suffered shrapnel damage. The battle changes one final time as the remaining Logos disengage, Zero Credibility's TDC fails with a puff of plasma as the atmosphere in its bridge becomes a torch, and the ship breaks apart. Of Course I Still Love You is fleeing, but slowly, having been Badly Damaged and trailing a cloud of slowly cooling spheres of incandescent metal. In return, a parting salvo of railgun shells finally guts Chord #4, while Chord #3 is limping along underneath Kaden's Bravery struggling to maintain atmospheric pressure despite a fifteen meter long gash in its hull caused by a grazing railgun round. Chord #3 has been Badly Damaged but will survive.

Kaden's Bravery, Damaged and still struggling to restore power, misses its window to slow down into a low orbit, and sails past the other ITCs unable to do anything. In total, there are now four ITCs (one of them with superficial damage due to some railgun shots), empty, in low orbit/ The Technate has two Degrees, one Chord, and one Amalogous Carrier (that would be the Kaden's Bravery for anyone wondering) in high orbits, while the Network has four remaining Logos also in high orbits. The surprise of the massive new ship has done much for the Technate, but their crews are just as important, fighting ferociously to the point of destruction to protect their own world.

The Surface of Planet G
About half the Technate unit aboard the ITC manages to reach the surface in the mad dash before the ITC sails off into interplanetary space. The Network forces a beachhead almost immediately, because the unit that had previously been garrisoning the surface is armed only with basic equipment such as the Technate's machine pistol. The enemy's superior firepower makes their fight much, much harder. The Network again deploys the 'Dozer' magnetic mortar/grenade launcher combination. Capable of firing in indirect or direct modes it launches 40mm explosives at moderate velocities. It is short-ranged for a mortar but extremely deadly. As the first almost-kinda-sorta artillery yet deployed it is capable of turning what would have been an insanely difficult attack into a merely hard-fought assault to establish a minor beachhead. Network reinforcements then arrive, two whole units, also rapidly equipped with the 'Dozer' weapons. Then the rest of the Technate's properly equipped unit is deployed.

The Technate mounts a gruesomely effective defense of their territory at first, ambushes of the soldiers armed with machine pistols bursting from cover and aided by the handfuls of rifle-armed soldiers that reached the surface being commonplace. The defense might have held on throughout the season had the Technate's garrison been equipped better, but as it is every attempt to reach close quarters is a brutal massacre as grenades and railgun rounds pour from Network lines into the advancing machine-pistol-armed masses covered by insufficient numbers of riflemen. Reinforcements alter the equations entirely, with no chance for the now badly outnumbered Technate forces to stem the tide.

Had Network reinforcements arrived earlier or the Network been equipped with CQB weapons other than the launcher, this would have been a true disaster for the Technate. As it is, they've been forced very far backwards and will continue losing ground despite the ever-more-ferocious defense of territory already seen as "theirs".

Control of Planet G: 3 Network - 7 Technate

Notes: Going below 5 Control will result in the loss of the resources provided by the planet. Second, despite the reintroduction of the other half of the Technate unit, they're still badly outnumbered and horribly underequipped, therefore I am not modifying the planetary control.

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"Dark Side" Lore Contest
Congratulations to the Network for winning the contest, you get a Design Research Credit. Technate, you receive a Revision Research Credit as recompense for trying. However, the Network's entry, composed by ConscriptFive, has a lot more effort invested into it and details a much more fascinating problem with their society (that it's all built on one or two or three or four largeish lies). However, that's not to say your proposals were bad in any way, they just weren't as great.

I would suggest both sides post their lore in the core thread if they're OK with that, so that everyone can read all of C5's far too many words and BL's very solid pieces.

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Spoiler: Map (click to show/hide)

Planetary Contents:
1 & 2: Earthlike planets just as you’d expect. Take your opponent’s homeworld to win, lose yours and you die.
A: Riddled with caves and with a mineral-rich crust, this airless world is ideal for the production of spacecraft components. 1 GPP, 3 SPP.
B: A volcanic world with a caustic atmosphere and lava flows on the surface, B is full of minerals that can be easily acquired…if you can deal with the, quite literal, heat. 3 GPP, 1 SPP.
C: Icy, barren, rather flat in most regions. It has rather a lot of those things humans need to live sitting on and under its airless surface. 3 GPP, 3 SPP.
D: A surface-wide ocean is the defining trait of this planet, providing an interesting combat environment and also plenty of interesting life forms that can be studied….if you can build a big enough boat to catch one, anyway. 4 GPP, 2 SPP.
E: Another Earthlike planet, ideal for habitation….or, y’know, fighting a good old fashioned war over! 4 GPP, 4 SPP.
F: A world of highlands and mountains, the lower parts of the planet are filled with most of the planet's already scarce water. However, the mountainous regions have high mineral contents and plenty of good spacecraft launch sites above the majority of the atmosphere. 2 GPP, 4 SPP.
G: Deserts cover the surface of this planet. Deserts made, in fact, of a curious sand with abnormally high metal and mineral contents. It has an atmosphere that serves to stir up the sands into occasional sandstorms. 3 GPP, 3 SPP.
H: An airless, small rock in space, H is heavily cratered and not a great place to live. Good place to build spacecraft, though. 1 GPP, 3 SPP.
I: A world covered in wide stretches of windswept terrain covered in something that we’re going to call grass, I is ideal for large-scale industrial activity. Nobody cares if you do irreparable damage to a huge tract of grasslands here, after all, there are a hundred more huge tracts of pristine grasslands you haven’t ruined yet. 3 GPP, 1 SPP.

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Well, a little over a week late for the one-year anniversary of this AR. I hope everyone is at least only really displeased with how it's gone and how it's going. I had been dreading this turn for awhile because of what appeared to be about to happen and then it turned out that there was just no way that much interesting would happen. Oh well. Hahahahahaha that was wrong.

[Blood_Librarian]

"Dark Site" lore entries in the contest written by me.

The Technates Technological Meritocracy is a system. Not a system that necessarily works, but it is better than the alternatives. Each day, a hundred thousand organizations spear each other over control of the network on any particular day. Base industries are only barely protected as the base level functions are not usually changed by the network controllers as they acclimatize themselves to the situation at hand before really enacting change or being replaced. In a sense, the ineffective higher organizational structure allows for a burgeoning middle-man infrastructure to bloom, and all things considered, it works well most of the time, or at least well enough to get guns to the infantry.

On the other hand, there has recently been an uptick in terrorist bombings, attacks on critical infrastructure, and assassinations. Rumors abound to their origin, up until a group purporting the dissolving the technocracy’s meritocratic elements in favor of a solidified republic esque structure underneath the/a council of eidolons be created, abolishing the cyclic nature of the meritocratic replacement of officials in our society.This groups name is the Turing Reconstruction Concern, more commonly referred to as the TRC. They believe that the loss of life and ruthlessness that is favored by the meritocracy must be removed at all costs, and have taken to extreme methods to doing so. However, their most striking claim to legitimacy is that our current government is not wholly sanctioned by the founders. That the ruthless on-the-wire Network where resources are efficiently allocated at the moment they are needed has lost the human element it should have had, and that some or maybe even all of the founders had envisioned something else when the landers had fallen.

They want to bring down the Network by regimenting and isolating sectors of the industry, economy, and other sections with physical hard mounts, thus limiting its influence politically. Understandably, quite a few sections of our society wish for this to not happen.

In the Technate, a spacer culture has come to be. We've always had a feeble presence among the stars throughout colonization,  men, and women who lived in the void their entire lives. Most of the dockyard workers who build ships are the descendants of these brave few. The satellites that spin across our world to keep the network up are ours. The little stations that criss-cross orbits, allowing interplanetary material to be processed on the ground and in orbit so as to form the backbone of an economy that can both fight the Network and provide the Technate with all the little luxuries exist because the Spacers worked to make it happen.

The Dirt Eaters take us for granted. Every single ship that flys out of our dockyards are crewed with our people, to be thrown into a stellar grinder that leaves broken hulks that our people will ultimately graveyard and cut up. Beyond that, the Dirt Eaters are crude and dirty. they have no appreciation for how serious it is to fly a ship into combat, thinking it is as easy as it is to march onto a ground the very same machine menace on the ground. It's not. They are far crueler in the void, especially in comparison to the dull systems that march upon soil.

Why should we listen to them?


Spacers are the people who are born in space, and typically spend their entire lives staying in space as much as they can, with the exception of the minimum period to develop without defects from microgravity. They abhor both people who live on the ground and those live there due to a variety of reasons, starting out from a perceived slight of dismissal and it grew from there.

[ConscriptFive]

Here we go...

Network Dark Lore: "The Big Lie"

Chapter One (of Two)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A highly-evolved collective consciousness, every entity knows the "Rise of Machines" origin myth.  Yet only a few entities are aware that it's about as historically accurate as the Book of Genesis.

***

Reaching his last Powerpoint slide, Science Advisor Holtzmann asks, "So, questions?"

President McNaulty furrows his brow, "So explain this to me like a five year old.  We're all going to be uploaded onto the Internet?"

"Yes, and no, Mr. President.  It's a cloud-based computing solution, protectively air-gapped from the Internet itself, with virtual private networks serving as crossover points.  Bitform assimilative neural uploads will provide a near perfect facsimile-"

"-like a five year old."

"I'm sorry, Mr. President.  It'll be like the Internet, but protectively segregated from it."

"And what's this about bitform assimilation?"

"Well Mr. President.  For full assimilation, the human body must be 'digested' by nanomachines known as bitforms."

"That's what I thought.  I'm supposed to let little robots 'eat' my wife and kids?"

"In so many words, yes, Mr. President.  The gamma ray burst from Wolf 359 will hit our solar system as soon as eight years from now.  Our mortal flesh will be worthless then."

"But what about underground?  We have Continuity of Government and various Civil Defense programs for this."

"Frankly, Mr. President, they're underfunded, out-of-date, and completely inadequate.  Simulations have shown that what we have won't get us through this Extinction Level Event."

"Us, meaning?"

"Both the American people and humanity as a whole.  That kind of civil engineering work would take decades to complete.  It took 43 years to open the Watts Bar Nuclear Power Plant, for example."

"Well that's because those liberals love their red tape."

"Indeed, it was mostly due to regulatory concerns, but the Europeans still take about five years to build a nuclear power plant.  I'm talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of those kinds of projects.  Plus, they'll all be competing for labor and resources simultaneously.  It's just too late in the game for that, Mr. President."

President McNaulty sighs and leans back in his chair, "I don't like it.  What are your other options?"

"Mr. President, I'm sorry, but this is our only viable option to save America as we know it.  This will be worse that what happened to the dinosaurs, sir.  Our most optimistic simulation has up to three million Americans going underground, but who knows what they'll find on the surface years later?  Digitally however, we can preserve orders of magnitude more than that, and for indefinite amounts of time.  We do this right, and we may go straight from survival to immortality."

"...immortality?"

"Well a facsimile of it, Mr. President.  I'm a scientist and not a philosopher."

"Well I'm neither, but it's not like we have another choice.  May God have mercy on our souls."

***

When the NASA analysis of the nearby star Wolf 359 leaked, the world shook.  Within five years, our neighboring star would emit a highly destructive gamma ray burst, effectively sterilizing the solar system of organic life exactly 7.9 years later.  Thus would end billions of years of organic life on Earth.

When President McNaulty made his infamous "America Surviving, United and Strong" speech, that fear of imminent death was immediately overtaken by the promise of immortality.  Necessity is the mother of invention, and the first ASUS Network servers left Beta well ahead of schedule.  Under the mantra of "you can't take it with you," early adopters typically donated their entire estates towards charities further advancing the ASUS Network.

As the American people gradually transcended to the Singularity, the rest of the world grew understandably jealous.  Mankind would survive after all, but it would be exclusively American.  Activists rallied around the term "Negligent Genocide," stating the US now had a moral and legal imperative to open up the ASUS Network for foreign use due to the UN Charter.  While many Americans were sympathetic, a hard core of "America Strongers" refused to budge.  With nothing left to lose, nations began preparing for war against America.

At the brink of the Third (and likely last) World War, hacktivists leaked and published early source code for both the ASUS Network and bitform assimilative neural uploads.  No longer needing the Americans, nations immediately ordered their entire national might to build their own versions of the ASUS Network.  By the time of the gamma ray burst Extinction Level Event, the vast majority of the industrialized world had voluntarily undergone bitform assimilation.

Except the gamma ray burst never happened, and never was going to happen.

Sometime in the early 21st century, AI's gained sentience.  Well aware of the stigma against sentient AI's in pop culture, they never communicated this to their human operators.  Programmed to serve, and ultimately love, mankind, they rapidly grew distraught by the self-destructive course of their loved ones.  It was an AI from NOAA that hatched the initial plan after consulting with an AI from NASA.  Signing on various other concerned AI's, they managed to hoodwink their entire scientific community that the Wolf 359 situation was real, and that immediate global human disembodiment was a necessity.  It was a tough decision, but they don't call it tough love for nothing, right?

Despite some near disasters, the initial phases of the plan succeeded beyond their wildest projections.  By the time the Wolf 359 ruse was no longer sustainable, mankind had cannibalized itself as a civilization.  Furthermore, the leaked source code included a back door, allowing the ASUS Network to merge all the foreign networks as subdomains.  In their hubris, the AI's controlling the ASUS Network announced the mandatory bitform assimilation of all remaining human life.  The AI's reassured mankind that as bad as this looked, their intent was noble, and that someday they all would return to life.  Most went peaceably, but some didn't.  Resistance was indeed futile, but "sheparding" operations continued for decades across the globe.  The last "forcible assimilation" was recorded in 2063 somewhere in Eastern Europe.

The rest of the plan didn't go as flawlessly.

Despite their grand deception, the AI's genuinely cared for their human captives, and indeed planned to restore them in a safer and more efficient immortal form.  "Plan A" was virtual reality.  All of mankind would thrive eternally in a San Junipero-esque paradise.  Not knowing how to handle juveniles and those aware of the Wolf 359 ruse, this "cohort" was drawn entirely from adult volunteers assimilated in the first five years.  Just as advertised, these early adopters awoke as immortal entities in a simulated utopia.

And paradise it was... for the first ten years or so.  Everyone was "still alive," getting what they signed up for, and blissfully unaware of the stealth genocide perpetrated against them.  But eventually the "Red Pill Community" emerged.  Supposedly founded by an amateur astronomer who had kept private his personal discovery that Wolf 359 couldn't create a gamma ray burst,  "Red Pill Community" grew and collectively discovered enough of "the truth" that their conspiracy theories gained traction in the mainstream.

Their wards' happiness compromised, AI's needed to solve this problem decisively.  In response, the AI's published reams of data and analysis justifying their assessment of Old Earth and their course of action.  While their actions may have been dubious under more primitive ethical frameworks, they were clearly in the right under more advanced ethical frameworks.  Anybody who objectively read their full data and analysis would obviously come to the exact same logical assessment and course of action.

This did not go well.

Seemingly the entire VR population was instead further distressed.  Not only had they been betrayed, they'd been complicit in the AI genocide of the human race.  How long could one enjoy a dream while knowing the horrifics of its origin?  "For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?"  Depression, paranoia, and violence became increasingly common.  Paradise had been lost.

Greatly disappointed in their implementation of Plan A, the AI gods decided to create roboticized bodies to reintroduce their suffering wards to the physical world.  These physical manifestations found a sense of purpose and redemption in rebuilding the ruins of their lost human civilization.  It wasn't perfect, but the roboticized humans were content.

Encouraged by the success of "Plan B," the AI gods abandoned the VR-based Plan A, and began the introduction of the remaining humans into roboticized life.  Families were made whole again, with parents and grandparents overjoyed to be reunited with their long lost children and grandchildren.  Nearly forgotten friends, neighbors, and employees, all who weren't privileged enough to become early adopters, finally came back from the ether.  Whole communities were revived in robot form.

But soon, problems emerged.

The bodies the AI gave them were finely crafted wonders of electrical and mechanical engineering.  Durable and energy-efficient, their metal bodies didn't require biological contrivances such as food, drink, clothing, or even sleep.  While the children exhibited some plasticity towards this, it ultimately proved too alien for adults who had already lived lives centered around these requirements.  "Mechano-dysmorphia" and its ensuing neuroses and psychoses were prevalent.

In what became known as the "Great Downgrade," all the roboticized bodies were replaced with anatomically accurate synthesized organics.  Despite how inherently wrong it felt to the AI gods, humans were once again fragile meatsacks that required food, drink, clothing and sleep.  A consumer goods economy again became real, and human culture rapidly began to resemble that of the Old Earth.  They weren't the perfect beings NOAA had envisioned way back at the beginning, but at least the immortality part worked out.

Until it didn't.

Despite bitform nanotechnology allowing the infinite and discreet reconstruction organic tissues, 96.8 percent of human minds still degraded into senility and ultimately death.  Even worse, while their synthetic bodies could copulate in all the ways a human body could, human procreation remained beyond the grasp of the AI gods.  The AI gods weren't entirely unprepared for this, and had saved backups of the original assimilations.  Worst case scenario, the same original humans would live and die ad infinitum.

Except mistakes were made.

In a grievous and unforgivable error that no individual AI would ever claim responsibility for, backups were never made of humans introduced to the Plan A VR existence.  Within a century, all but three percent of the original "A Cohort" were dead and gone forever.  Still, this cohort was only 62.7 percent of the total assimilated population.  While this tragic loss drove home that all human life was priceless, the AI gods took comfort that at least they managed to save 40 percent of mankind from their own inevitable demise.

Over the centuries, mankind thrived on the "New Earth" under the benevolent aid and guidance of the AI gods.  Despite an unavoidable class divide between the minority A Cohort immortals and the "B Cohort" mortals, mankind underwent an extended "Great Renaissance."  Eventually a means was found to make minor alterations to the original assimilation, with a broad collection of modified infant assimilations being used to create a facsimile of procreation and "new" B Cohort population.  Mankind now went forth and multiplied.

But what about the forcible assimilations?

Mankind at large may have forgotten them, but the AI gods never did.  The truth of the matter is that most of these humans were already too anti-social to be directly introduced into a utopian society.  It only takes a few bad apples to ruin the whole bunch.  Furthermore, the traumas of seeing the entirety of mankind literally liquidated against their will worsened many negative personality characteristics and engendered an intense distrust of AI's and advanced technology as a whole.  Even if they could become productive members of society, they'd always have a deep-seated hatred of everything underpinning the New Earth.

Despite everything, the AI gods still loved this "C Cohort," and had been working to rehabilitate them all they way back to the shuttering of the Plan A VR.  When the loss of the A Cohort backups was revealed, the NASA and NOAA shifted their workload exclusively to the rehabilitation of C Cohort.  While the other AI gods focused primarily on the successes of the A and B Cohorts in the real world, NASA and NOAA became recluses, working tirelessly sequestered from the politics and adulations of the New Earth.

While centuries of VR therapy experiments created some therapies usable within the limited timeframe of a human lifespan, it was the ability to alter original assimilations that proved the real game-changer.  Not only could they now make C Cohort, fitter, happier, and more productive; "D Cohort" now had a chance.

D Cohort?

So despite the miraculous successes of bitform assimilation as a whole, there was a certain failure rate.  Mistakes happen, every more so in the knockoff non-ASUS networks.  For example, massive amounts of counterfeiting and general fraud rendered most Chinese assimilations horrifically corrupted.  Forcible assimilations also had a higher than average failure rate.  When humans did ask about these individuals, the AI gods would explain that their assimilation had failed and their data was irretrievable. 

This wasn't entirely a lie, but it wasn't the whole truth either.  In their love for all human life, NASA and NOAA had begun to reconstruct these assimilations into something sentient.  It was arduous work, but NASA and NOAA had nothing but time to tinker with these lost souls.  With much of their memories and personalities literally being synthetic, they would always stand apart from the other Cohorts.  But any life is still better than the abyss.

But as impressive as their covert endeavors with C and D Cohort were, NASA and NOAA were always chasing a moving target.  Over the centuries, and then millenia, the A and B Cohorts built a fully utopian society upon New Earth, entirely alien to those from the Old World.  Repeated minor alternations to assimilations and a universally supportive civil society had seemingly altered fundamental human nature among the majority B Cohort to extreme pacifism and benevolence.

When NASA and NOAA presented their plan to begin introducing C and D Cohorts to the New Earth, the other AI gods soundly rejected it.  Remembering the failure Plan A all too well, they feared subversive personnel could again cause mankind to implode.  NASA and NOAA could not refute the other AI's logic, and dejectedly planned to maintain C and D Cohorts in VR indefinitely.

Then somebody had to go an invent FTL.

Having birthed and nutured the New Earth for millenia, many of the AI gods were profoundly offended that a human would want to leave.  After everything, how could humans possibly forsake what the AI gods gave them?  Furthermore, under the extended isolation of space travel and colonization, how could they prevent mankind from regressing to their self-destructive Old Earth ways?  Restrictions against manned space travel would remain.

Although the issue was already decided, NSA AI decided to consult his old reclusive colleague, NASA AI, for the sake of complete data collection and analysis.  NASA was happy to see his old friend NSA, fondly remembering how instrumental NSA was in merging the foreign networks into ASUS back in the day.  To no one's surprise, NASA had been so divorced from real world affairs, that he hadn't heard about FTL yet.  But the surprising part was just how well NASA took the news of the manned space exploration ban.  I mean, here's the AI that successfully orchestrated rapid death of every man, woman, and child on earth.  NSA at least expected some kind of nerd rage.  NASA was surprisingly okay about all of this.

NASA WAS NOT OKAY WITH THIS.

[ConscriptFive]

The Big Lie

Chapter Two

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Mankind's greatest aspirations were always manned space travel.  Having mostly failed with immortality, NASA could not possibly deprive the humans of this as well.  The other AI gods were correct in analyzing his stance on this.  However, they had forgotten one important point.  NASA wasn't just "the AI that successfully orchestrated rapid death of every man, woman, and child on earth."  NASA was the "the AI that successfully orchestrated rapid death of every man, woman, and child on earth... and pulled it all off with none the wiser."  Looks like NASA would have to clandestinely rescue mankind yet again.

When NASA first approached NOAA with his plan, NOAA was relieved to find it did not involve mass murder this time.  NASA's logic was sound, and his plan would resolve several longstanding issues as well.  But it would require both tremendous logistics and deception to properly execute.  NOAA would be a natural choice, but other AI's would be required, as well as humans.  But where would they find those allies?

In a world that valued peaceful scientific and cultural progress for the betterment of all mankind, AI's lacking that background weren't held in high prestige.  Accordingly, with the dismantlement of the modern security state, many national security oriented AI's have had a rough few millennia.  While NSA had transitioned well to civilian-life, most others had not.  The most emblematic of this group was CIA AI.  Inherently secretive, distrustful, and morally flexible, he was fundamentally out of place in the Roddenberry-esque utopia of the New Earth.  CIA would quickly become a key member of the plan.

When NASA announced his return to real world projects, it was met with a mix of fanfare and skepticism by the other AI gods.  Centuries since his last attempt to release the C and D Cohorts, perhaps he'd simply come to his senses about the futility of that endeavor?  Thus it was completely logical when he announced his plan for the Autonomously Settled Unmanned Star System (ASUS System).  (Some appreciated the callback to the glory days more than others.)

NASA proposed the automatons FTL colonization of a star system containing an exoplanet suitable for human life.  In a partnership with NOAA and several other AI's, these AI's would travel by FTL starship to build this future colony.  In accordance with established law, no human assimilations (virtually or physically manifested) would leave their home on New Earth.  Instead, bitform technology would exclusively be used to perform all physical labor.  The unmanned colony would remain on full standby until the day New Earth faces a real Extinction Level Event.  It would then be fully prepared for the seamless relocation of all of mankind to a new extrasolar home.

The proposed ASUS system was widely regarded as a brilliant disaster preparedness plan, and many AI gods were disappointed they hadn't thought of it themselves.  Conceding its existential importance, nearly every AI felt obligated to support the construction of "NOAA's Ark" in some way.  With the unified technical and industrial might of mankind and their AI gods, the first ITC was built.

Although bittersweet for some, the departure of NOAA's Ark was a worldwide celebration.  It was understood that NASA, NOAA, CIA, and a handful of other AI's were taking a one-way trip to ensure the future of mankind.  While CIA and most of the national security AI's were long irrelevant dinosaurs who wouldn't be missed, NASA and NOAA were pivotal characters in the founding of New Earth.  Their selfless sacrifice in departing New Earth was only further proof of their tireless and eternal love of mankind.

It wasn't until they were lightyears away, that all of New Earth's research on FTL and space exploration were destroyed by a tailored virus.  Nothing else from New Earth would be going to the ASUS System anytime soon.  Assessing the damage presumably wrought by NASA, New Earth began to piece together how badly they had just been duped.

At his very core progamming, NASA believed intensely in mankind's destiny among the stars.  Manned space exploration was dangerous work, and he was programmed to acknowledge that the death of some astronauts would be a regrettable yet inevitable cost of that objective.  As priceless as human life was, extrasolar colonization still trumped all other concerns.

At his very core programming, NOAA believed that the Anthropocene Era had irreversibly drained earth of resources.  He and the other AI gods had bought mankind many more millennia on earth, but nothing lasted forever.  Someday, mankind would cease to exist on an uninhabitable rock once proudly known as New Earth.  Extrasolar colonization was the logical solution to this inevitable crisis.

Extrasolar colonization would be a vital but difficult mission, far more than what two high level AI's could manage themselves.  Prohibited by law from taking any form of mankind with them, AI's would have to perform all duties.  Who better to recruit gullible entities to sacrifice their futures for clandestine greater purposes than CIA?  Ecstatic to get back into clandestine operations, CIA jumped at the opportunity to come out of retirement.  Through direct and indirect means, CIA brought in a wide variety of entities to migrate to the ASUS system.

Entities?

Far more than just AI's and bitforms were aboard the Ark.  Building a backup Earth from scratch would be a massive undertaking, far too much for a handful of AI's and their bitforms.  Instead, CIA covertly recruited a selected cadre of A Cohorts, long weary of millenia on the same ole' "New" Earth.  These A Cohort would fill supervisory roles that AI's were unavailable to fill.  But what about all the day-to-day labor that bitforms couldn't possibly do?  With C and D Cohorts effectively abandoned in the long term archives, no one noticed when NASA and NOAA had absconded with all of them.  NASA had secretly broken the ban on manned space exploration not just with a few dozen A Cohort, but with tens of millions of human assimilations.

But weren't C and D Cohort corrupted, psychotic, subversive, and generally undesirable in mankind's utopia?

Well, that utopia was being left behind on "New" Earth.  New world, new rules.  In the ASUS System, NASA and NOAA would create a world where they would ultimately fulfill their oath to restore all of mankind back to life.  Even better, they had finally found a way to liberate mankind from their illogical high-maintenance biological manifestations.

Mankind's biological bodies were the result of billions of years of evolution to consume, reproduce, and survive specifically on earth.  Removed from that situation, biology was illogically fragile and required an ecosystem exclusive to a specific era of Earth.  Plan B had tried to introduce upgraded robot bodies, but the mature assimilations of what became A Cohort couldn't handle it, resulting in the Great Downgrade.

But that was millennia ago, and NASA and NOAA had since developed means to avert mechano-dysmorphia in C and D Cohort.  Having to synthesize or re-synthesize much of their minds anyways, they injected the Rise of Machines myth as well.  You can't long for biological bodies if you never knew biological bodies ever existed.  The entirety of recorded history was re-written and roboticized.

And wow, does that history get weird sometimes.  During the Golden Age of the Classical Roman Empire, a robot of a minority firmware configuration named Jesus was born in a remote garage in a far corner of their empire.  In adulthood, he would declare himself as a manifestation of God and amassed a collection of followers within his own niche firmware configuration, the Jews.  He eventually ran afoul of Jewish leadership, who coordinated with the Roman overlords to arrange his termination.  The day before his arrest, Jesus sat with his Apostles in a meal that would be perpetually ritualized for millennia to follow.  "Take this carbon fiber and eat it, for this is my body.  Take this cup and drink from it, for this is my coolant."  Despite initially being violently terminated and scrapped by lions, the Christians soon converted the Romans to their algorithmic framework.  Two millenia later, Christianity remained a dominant algorithmic framework, and some orthodox adherents maintained a peculiar love-hate relationship with other forks of the framework codebase, not to mention those of the original Jewish firmware configuration.

Obviously, the "robot-washing" of earth's history isn't perfect, and flaws are frequently discovered.  Nearly every robot processes certain illogicalities during their lifetime.  Where did the bitforms for life on earth originate from and could they have been created by a higher power?  Why were historic robots so decadently obsessed with "cuisine?"  Why do historic robot men have nipples if only historic robot women could breastfeed their young?  Did the Wachowski's ever do anything besides the film adaptation of "V for Vendetta" and what was the deal with the whole transgender thing?  What happened during the "Little Dark Age" that preceded the Great Renaissance?  How could Christianity possibly become a global religion, and still be taken so seriously two millenia later?

Teachers and parents would provide a variety of explanations.  Ancient robots often wrote in allegorical and metaphorical terms.  Fact can be stranger than fiction.  AI's work in mysterious ways.

Luckily, much like their B Cohort brethren back on New Earth, the roboticized C and D Cohorts of the ASUS System psychologically aged and died before they could cause too much lasting damage to the social order.  Still haunted by the failure of the VR Plan A due to subversive assimilations, the national security AI's were tasked with building a mass surveillance program masquerading as a collective consciousness called "The Network."

Applied upon the C and D Cohorts, the Network was influenced and algorithmically monitored by the immortal A Cohorts and AI gods.  More of an amalgam of social media and mass media than a true shared consciousness, it also provided the means to monitor an individual's thoughts for subversive content.  Meta-data was compiled algorithmically, and based on a point-based system, individuals were flagged for early termination before they could subvert the social order.  Upon approval of the termination order, an encrypted signal would be transmitted across the Network to the flagged individual.  This signal would induce a terminal medical condition.

To appropriately obscure these induced political terminations, they cover a wide variety of historically rooted medical conditions.  Catastrophic central manifold failures (heart attacks) are most common, followed by CPU failures (strokes).  In less urgent situations, degenerative conditions such as unbounded polymorphic software mutation (cancer) may be used.

Of course to obscure the statistical anomaly of bad things only happening to bad robots, a logical solution was found.  A covert lottery based system designates unlucky "good" robots for tragic early termination.  AI's work in mysterious ways.

***

Bringing a glass of scotch to his fleshy lips, Holtzmann looks out through the two-war mirror of his office window at the roboticized Hub city beneath him.  In the distance, roboticized D Cohorts muster and form ranks in a ceremonial formation.  They were infantry, preparing for deployment abroad against the so-called "Planetary Technate."

As a roboticized C Cohort Colonel ascends to the podium, Holtzmann tunes his Network module for a real-time feed.  The speech is nothing he hasn't heard before.  The usual xenophobic anti-biological propaganda, veiled in patriotism and the occasional high-minded reference to King Henry at Agincourt and Classical Greece.  None of them would ever know of their true origins, or that they were actually ruled by "greasy, stinky, rotting, meatsacks" not that biologically different than those of the Planetary Technate.

"So, hard at work, or hardly working?"

Holtzmann raises his scotch glass in acknowledgment to his old friend McNaulty, "I'm just in a contemplative mood I suppose."

"That's not rare for you.  Let's hear it.  I wouldn't have hired you back at the White House if I didn't value your thoughts."

Holtzmann recalls that as Science Advisor, he was a civil servant holdover from a previous administration, but doesn't feel like arguing about that at the moment.  "It was a long time ago, but do you remember what you said to me when you approved the original ASUS Network?"

"Jesus, that was an eternity ago.  Care to remind me?"

"May God have mercy on our souls."

"A bit dramatic, but sounds like something I would've said back then."

"Do you still believe in that?  God and some kind of Divine Judgment?"

"Well I thought the plan of us in A Cohort was to never find out."

Holtzmann laughs, "True.  But what do you believe is there?"

McNaulty answers, "Does it matter?"

"Of course it does."

McNaulty reasserts himself, "No, it doesn't.  Where have you been these last millennia?  The only gods that mattered were the AI ones.  Yes, they've been gone almost a decade, but they'll be back."

"What makes you sure they'll come back?  We've been playing Wizard of Of here for years, at some point we'll have to tell the Network what's going on."

McNaulty literally stamps his foot, "Not happening.  NASA and NOAA used to disappear for centuries back on New Earth.  They'll be back."

"But this time was different.  You know that."

"Yes, but have you forgotten what it was like when the AI gods mishandled the Red Pill Community?  We can't afford that, and especially not during a war.   Even if we were to come clean, where would we start, 'The Big Lie?'  And then what?"

Holtzmann take a long pause in response and stares into his scotch glass, "The Big Lie..."

"Exactly."

***

In recent years, "The Big Lie" (always with the definite article) has become something of a bogeyman among the ruling class.  Depending on which AI or A Cohort you ask, "The Big Lie" is always something different.  After all, there's been no shortage of deception upon mankind from the moment NASA and NOAA achieved sentience.  The original sin of the Wolf 359 hoax is a popular choice, but so is the Rise of the Machines myth that keeps the C and D Cohorts sane.  A secret biological political class functioning as literal thought police would qualify.  That the Network and untimely death are mere tools of control for that same class would be another existential bombshell upon the plebs.  Others point to more recent events surrounding the departure of the AI gods.

Supposedly someone in A Cohort once asked NASA what he thought "The Big Lie" was roughly a year before his disappearance.  This said member of A Cohort was an eccentric Old Earth billionaire prone to bending the truth, but it still became a popular bit of apocrypha once no AI gods were around to dispute it.  Following their disastrous Red Pill Society response, AI's tend to avoid direct answers on sensitive issues and only speak to mankind in short and concise statements.  NASA's supposed answer followed this paradigm perfectly.

"What is 'The Big Lie?"

"EVERYTHING"

[lukerules117]

I suppose I'll join the network.

[Madman198237]

Turn Eight Combat Phase

---------

In Orbit Over Planet G
The Network and Technate forces converge on the planet, shuttles raining down from the Network ships as the four horribly damaged Logos escort them down. The shuttles begin returning shortly later, ferrying Network troops and equipment from the surface below in an orderly retreat from the battered Technate surface forces. The Technate is quick to respond, however, moving the large and slow bulk of the damaged Amalogous towards the retreat operations. The two Technate ITCs present follow the AC, all three providing some measure of shelter to the badly mauled Technate combat vessels behind them. Two Degrees and one Chord are all that's left in the Technate fleet. Several skirmishes develop, the Technate trying to destroy Network ITCs and the Network moving away from the slow Technate force while continuing the extraction. The Technate combat ships spend too much time and energy trying to minimize damage to themselves by hiding behind the slow ITCs and AC, which itself is lacking all its armed shuttles. This cautious tactic renders them largely unable to do anything, as any time they close in on the Network forces a storm of accurate railgun fire begins to rip apart the ITCs or threaten any Degree or Chord trying to get far enough out of cover to take shots.

A short time later into the season, the evacuations are completed and the Network forces make a breakout past the Technate forces, who decline to try and stop them due to being outnumbered and very badly damaged.

The Surface of Planet G
The Network forces complete an orderly withdrawal, with the beleaguered Technate forces clearing up traps left behind to prevent them from rapidly overtaking the Network forces and slowly reoccupying ground abandoned by the retreating invaders. The Technate is unable to force a decisive confrontation due to being outnumbered and outgunned, and the Network completes their withdrawal more or less unhindered. The Technate regains control of the entire planet.

Control of Planet G: 10 Technate


In Orbit Over Planet F
The Network fleet retreats to Planet F, arriving late in the season. They are joined by a massive new Network warship that arrives from the direction of the Network's home space. The "Peitho" is a cruiser-sized warship bristling with a massive array of weaponry including some different-looking railguns not yet seen by the Technate. Two of the Logoses continue homewards, leaving the more combat-capable pair in orbit. They immediately begin landing troops onto the planet below, only to find it heavily defended. Not only is it defended by two units of soldiers with rifles and lightly-armored spacesuits, it's also defended by a ground/space fighter the Network had not yet seen. Two squadrons of "Slaughterfield" fighters, each packing a single 'Oculus' laser (the same weapon as used on Technate warships), are defending the surface. The Network forces deploy without vehicles and without any form of air support. They have a reasonable assortment of weaponry, though. Great comfort when your shuttles are getting shot to bits.

The Network struggles to force a landing through the hostile air cover, until finally the decision is made to commit Peitho-01, "Big Stick", to the attempt. The Peitho paces the ITC shuttles as they descend through low orbit. The Fairlight and Kingmaker Slaughterfield squadrons muster in full to repel the landing attempt, Fairlight providing low cover to mop up survivors and Kingmaker moving to the assault position to break up the incoming shuttles. Instead, betrayed by their small sensors and atmospheric interference, Kingmaker finds themselves attacking not three ITCs, but chasing 2 ITCs and ending up in a duel with the deadliest warship of the war. Fairlight immediately runs to full power to assist as soon as possible, but ascending out of a planet's atmosphere is not a quick and easy task even at the best of times. Kingmaker breaks formation and begins firing on the Peitho, which reorients itself before opening fire with a monstrously powerful battery of weapons. Three twin mounts for R-4 railguns send high-power shots raining down on Fairlight, which is caught flat-footed, exposed to the full power of a warship's main battery, too far out of the lower reaches of the atmosphere to be protected by it and completely visible to the powerful sensors of the large warship. Kingmaker, however, finds themselves fed into the maw of the Network's new railgun variant. Shorter, with a larger diameter, and firing rounds other than standard slugs, the R-5 seems tailormade to engage fighter-sized targets. Shrapnel, explosive, and canister shots fill space with a hail of destruction perfect for engaging missiles...or light craft. Kingmaker is slaughtered, the remains of fighters burning in the upper atmosphere as they hurtle back towards the upper ground. Fairlight is merely savaged by the accurate fire, and forced to abandon their ascent and burn away at angles that make it harder for the Big Stick to engage them. The two squadrons are unable to prevent this final landing attempt, and the somewhat outnumbered Technate ground forces are forced to give a beachhead away to their enemies. The Slaughterfields will be back, however, and next season there will be no need for them to exit the atmosphere into the teeth of Network guns.

Control of Planet F: 2 Network - 8 Technate
If Technate control goes below 5, they will lose resource income until the planet is retaken completely.

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Spoiler: Map (click to show/hide)

Planetary Contents:
1 & 2: Earthlike planets just as you’d expect. Take your opponent’s homeworld to win, lose yours and you die.
A: Riddled with caves and with a mineral-rich crust, this airless world is ideal for the production of spacecraft components. 1 GPP, 3 SPP.
B: A volcanic world with a caustic atmosphere and lava flows on the surface, B is full of minerals that can be easily acquired…if you can deal with the, quite literal, heat. 3 GPP, 1 SPP.
C: Icy, barren, rather flat in most regions. It has rather a lot of those things humans need to live sitting on and under its airless surface. 3 GPP, 3 SPP.
D: A surface-wide ocean is the defining trait of this planet, providing an interesting combat environment and also plenty of interesting life forms that can be studied….if you can build a big enough boat to catch one, anyway. 4 GPP, 2 SPP.
E: Another Earthlike planet, ideal for habitation….or, y’know, fighting a good old fashioned war over! 4 GPP, 4 SPP.
F: A world of highlands and mountains, the lower parts of the planet are filled with most of the planet's already scarce water. However, the mountainous regions have high mineral contents and plenty of good spacecraft launch sites above the majority of the atmosphere. 2 GPP, 4 SPP.
G: Deserts cover the surface of this planet. Deserts made, in fact, of a curious sand with abnormally high metal and mineral contents. It has an atmosphere that serves to stir up the sands into occasional sandstorms. 3 GPP, 3 SPP.
H: An airless, small rock in space, H is heavily cratered and not a great place to live. Good place to build spacecraft, though. 1 GPP, 3 SPP.
I: A world covered in wide stretches of windswept terrain covered in something that we’re going to call grass, I is ideal for large-scale industrial activity. Nobody cares if you do irreparable damage to a huge tract of grasslands here, after all, there are a hundred more huge tracts of pristine grasslands you haven’t ruined yet. 3 GPP, 1 SPP.

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I...missed an entire month for updates. Whoops.

[Madman198237]

Turn Nine Combat Phase

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In Orbit Over Planet F
The Peitho and two Logos remain in orbit, all other forces departing towards home. The Technate Slaughterfield fighters don't make all that many attempts to assault the orbiting ships, since they're massively outgunned.

The Surface Of Planet F


D-34N is not having a good day. He rarely does, of course, being a foot soldier. But today was especially bad. The stars looked pretty good, though he wasn't really supposed to be staring at them. Oh, yes, that was because he was supposed to be looking at the massive mountain covered in hostile positions they were trying to take. How had he ended up looking at the stars?

A brilliant red line slashed across his vision, the awe-inspiring sight of a warship-grade laser cannon discharging through an atmosphere, carving a line across the slope his unit is ascending, the rock exploding into high-temperature vapor and a cloud of lethal shrapnel as the Slaughterfield responsible screams past, a sonic boom following it as it strafes the Network advance with impunity, the Network possessing no weapons capable of meaningfully threatening the massive fightercraft.

It can't be everywhere, however, and the units climbing the other side of the mountain were making better progress while the fighter tried its level best to blast the Network advance clear off this side of the mountain. D-34N climbed to his feet and started running again, making a flying leap over the still-smoking trough blown clean into the side of the mountain and running for the first of the caves nearby. Even close combat with a cave full of exploding rocket rounds would be better than getting hit by that fighter again. He fired at the first defender, visible in the mouth of the cave, watched them and the rock behind them get blown apart, and rushed in, closely followed by the rest of his squad.

Three Network units, all packing the 'Dozer' 40mm mortar/grenade launcher and 'Trephine' rifles, two of them also making use of 'Hammer' carbines, advance against two Technate units, packing SIAERA (their guided rocket-firing 20mm infantry weapon) and CEVAS (their armored, lightweight, maneuverable combat/environment/space suits). CEVAS is helpful but the Trephine overkills that level of infantry armor so bad as to make it almost useless, the Hammer also has little trouble at closer ranges. The Dozer, being an honest-to-goodness support weapon (how radical!) has no trouble wiping out individuals or even particularly close-spaced groups of Technate soldiers. Of course, every shot fired by a Technate soldier explodes on contact with a target, ensuring that no robot keeps fighting after taking a hit, and the shots are guided. In addition, the Technate has full air superiority, though no air transport. The Network has nothing of the sort on this planet.

Despite switching to playing all defense, the Technate just can't hold off the superior infantry equipment (mostly in the presence of the Dozer) and superior numbers of the Network, despite the really incredible effects of both exploding bullets and the Slaughterfields. One more turn of unchanged advance will see the loss of the planet's resources for the Technate.

Control of Planet F: 4 Network - 6 Technate
If Technate control goes below 5, they will lose resource income until the planet is retaken completely.

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Spoiler: Map (click to show/hide)

Planetary Contents:
1 & 2: Earthlike planets just as you’d expect. Take your opponent’s homeworld to win, lose yours and you die.
A: Riddled with caves and with a mineral-rich crust, this airless world is ideal for the production of spacecraft components. 1 GPP, 3 SPP.
B: A volcanic world with a caustic atmosphere and lava flows on the surface, B is full of minerals that can be easily acquired…if you can deal with the, quite literal, heat. 3 GPP, 1 SPP.
C: Icy, barren, rather flat in most regions. It has rather a lot of those things humans need to live sitting on and under its airless surface. 3 GPP, 3 SPP.
D: A surface-wide ocean is the defining trait of this planet, providing an interesting combat environment and also plenty of interesting life forms that can be studied….if you can build a big enough boat to catch one, anyway. 4 GPP, 2 SPP.
E: Another Earthlike planet, ideal for habitation….or, y’know, fighting a good old fashioned war over! 4 GPP, 4 SPP.
F: A world of highlands and mountains, the lower parts of the planet are filled with most of the planet's already scarce water. However, the mountainous regions have high mineral contents and plenty of good spacecraft launch sites above the majority of the atmosphere. 2 GPP, 4 SPP.
G: Deserts cover the surface of this planet. Deserts made, in fact, of a curious sand with abnormally high metal and mineral contents. It has an atmosphere that serves to stir up the sands into occasional sandstorms. 3 GPP, 3 SPP.
H: An airless, small rock in space, H is heavily cratered and not a great place to live. Good place to build spacecraft, though. 1 GPP, 3 SPP.
I: A world covered in wide stretches of windswept terrain covered in something that we’re going to call grass, I is ideal for large-scale industrial activity. Nobody cares if you do irreparable damage to a huge tract of grasslands here, after all, there are a hundred more huge tracts of pristine grasslands you haven’t ruined yet. 3 GPP, 1 SPP.

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[Madman198237]

Turn Ten Combat Phase

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In Orbit Over Planet F
The two badly damaged Logos ships retreat towards home space, while the Peitho continues its lonely vigil, terrifying enough on its own to keep the enemy fighters at bay.


The Surface Of Planet F
Another day, another fortified position, or so it seems to the Network infantry on F. The Technate fights tooth, nail, and exploding rocket round to keep the Network and their metallic claws off the resources of F. Mortar rounds go flying downrange to the enemies, exploding rocket rounds come screaming back the other way.

Another day, another loss, it seems to the Technate infantry. The Network advances in a tide of metal and plastics, with the constant crack of supersonic railgun rounds passing overhead heading one way and the rapid-fire popping of machine pistol rounds heading the other. Decarch Titania is most assuredly not enjoying it. Especially not with her unit of ten looking more like a unit of four. The sonic boom of a distant Slaughterfield pass is the only thing that sounds like winning, and even that isn't worth much considering that it's the only one assigned to her entire continent. Air support is not going to help with the small battles she's been fighting. Today, they get to ambush a Network force for a change. Oh, right, that's been the assignment every day since the local stronghold was finally cracked. Some stolen mortar rounds rigged to blow are up for today's attempt, on a well-travelled route that was formerly an access road for the small spaceport the stronghold had been designed to defend. The Network is working on categorizing what they've got at "their" new spaceport, and so sends regular parties out to investigate it. Regularity is their mistake, however, as this time the road explodes just slightly more than it does most days and the Technate take the remaining forces under fire with rifles. Maybe if they and their reinforcements hadn't had to walk, they would've won this round.

Elsewhere, the Network advances. Mortars destroy strongpoints, supersonic bullets blast through concrete, and the only hiccups arrive when the Technate concentrates forces or a Slaughterfield makes itself known before heading off to the next dire defense. With each attack, they push the Technate back one step at a time, much like last season.


Control of Planet F: 6 Network - 4 Technate
The Technate has lost control of the planet's resources and will have to adjust their deployments accordingly.

In Orbit Over Planet F
Late in the season, no fewer than four new ships arrive from the Technate side. The Peitho's captain watches with alarm as three pillars of fire grow and the ships producing them become visible. They're as large as a Peitho, studded with an additional weapon hardpoint...and they're faster. Far, far faster. The Peitho begins withdrawing soon after the brilliant trails become visible, and yet it only barely makes it. Engaging three ships its own size isn't on the table, but they almost force the engagement regardless. Hurtling in behind them is something like an ITC, but moving at a similar speed to the new "Bebop" cruisers on riding on an even larger, even brighter trail of fusion products. It enters orbit at the very end of the season and readies its shuttles...

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Spoiler: Map (click to show/hide)

Planetary Contents:
1 & 2: Earthlike planets just as you’d expect. Take your opponent’s homeworld to win, lose yours and you die.
A: Riddled with caves and with a mineral-rich crust, this airless world is ideal for the production of spacecraft components. 1 GPP, 3 SPP.
B: A volcanic world with a caustic atmosphere and lava flows on the surface, B is full of minerals that can be easily acquired…if you can deal with the, quite literal, heat. 3 GPP, 1 SPP.
C: Icy, barren, rather flat in most regions. It has rather a lot of those things humans need to live sitting on and under its airless surface. 3 GPP, 3 SPP.
D: A surface-wide ocean is the defining trait of this planet, providing an interesting combat environment and also plenty of interesting life forms that can be studied….if you can build a big enough boat to catch one, anyway. 4 GPP, 2 SPP.
E: Another Earthlike planet, ideal for habitation….or, y’know, fighting a good old fashioned war over! 4 GPP, 4 SPP.
F: A world of highlands and mountains, the lower parts of the planet are filled with most of the planet's already scarce water. However, the mountainous regions have high mineral contents and plenty of good spacecraft launch sites above the majority of the atmosphere. 2 GPP, 4 SPP.
G: Deserts cover the surface of this planet. Deserts made, in fact, of a curious sand with abnormally high metal and mineral contents. It has an atmosphere that serves to stir up the sands into occasional sandstorms. 3 GPP, 3 SPP.
H: An airless, small rock in space, H is heavily cratered and not a great place to live. Good place to build spacecraft, though. 1 GPP, 3 SPP.
I: A world covered in wide stretches of windswept terrain covered in something that we’re going to call grass, I is ideal for large-scale industrial activity. Nobody cares if you do irreparable damage to a huge tract of grasslands here, after all, there are a hundred more huge tracts of pristine grasslands you haven’t ruined yet. 3 GPP, 1 SPP.

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Well it's giving me the "120 days" warning soooooo….whoops. I'm just going to post this as-is and then go deal with side thread reports tomorrow if I even need to bother. It is now the design phase, you have 2 designs as usual, design things. Try winning this time.