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Serf posted:the lower georgia united workers' front looks forward to our participation in these proceedings How’s the weather in Tallahassee these days?
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Oct 23, 2020 06:53
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Pacho posted:Roverhaus bracing a Rad Storm in the North American Exclusion Area #3, while on an emergency re-supply mission to a Reclamation Project team 
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Oct 27, 2020 04:27
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Rhjamiz posted:Is there an easy way to set up my copy of Aurora so I can play with designs using what we've got? Keeping in mind I have very little idea what the hell I'm doing. Yes. Start a new game and give yourself a boatload of free research points, then find out what techs we have and instantly research them all using the points. I think you can SM yourself extra research points, too.
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Nov 2, 2020 05:07
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Antilles posted:How fast do colonies usually grow, and how large can they generally get? I get the impression Lunagrad ballooned quickly and unexpectedly, will other colonies grow like that (and to that size), subject to travel time of the transports? I don't know the actual numbers behind it but colonies will grow to the size their infrastructure permits, and they'll produce some of their own infrastructure (also, spoiler for later but once we have more civilian shipping the companies will automatically move privately created infrastructure around if we don't give them something else to do). So we can affect the rate at which the colony grows. As for "how large" that depends on the body. Checking it on my game right now Luna's maximum population is 890 million.
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Nov 2, 2020 18:14
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sebmojo posted:
 maybe Flight 19 is there too
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Dec 15, 2020 10:31
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Mister Bates posted:Over half of the structures are cold and dead, ambient temperature, clearly abandoned or destroyed. Many are not. The site is dotted with the mottled red and orange of active heat signatures - most of them small, weak, and intermittent, and some of them in structures that are largely destroyed. There are two exceptions. Reading back over this (particularly the bit I’ve underlined) and the original description of the ruins on Page 13 of this thread, I’m wondering if we can tell from the imagery we’ve collected whether the currently ruined state of the complex is consistent with what you’d expect from air/space bombardment using explosives, potentially nuclear ones? Also now that I’ve asked that question a second one occurs to me: does my ship have, uh, a Geiger counter?
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Dec 16, 2020 04:24
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Hard to guess what we’ll find down there. What if the aliens have been watching Earth for millions of years and taking things when they feel like it? For all we know we’ll go knocking and a velociraptor will open the door.
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Dec 17, 2020 03:19
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There is almost nothing on the Cydonia Proton--as we have begun calling the ship designated Proton-B 001 among ourselves--that is older than me. Senior Engineer Kosciuszko, the senior of the two engineers caring for the M109 nuclear thermal engine, is older than I am, as is our senior sensor operator, Senior Technician Rosario. They are both graduates of their technical schools rather than officers commissioned into the command track like myself. The other crew--the two pilots and the junior engineers and technicians under Kosciuszko and Rosario--are younger, and all of the equipment is new. Well, except for precisely one dozen pieces of it. What is new is not just new. It is revolutionary. I think of the ship like a beetle with its exoskeleton, and indeed, most of the structure is external rather than internal. It is made of a metal that has, within my lifetime, changed our estimations of what is possible. The key parts of the engine that hammered us into Martian orbit at eleven hundred and thirty kilometers a second are built of similar metals, and of course, the FESTER-01 array that is the center of our mission uses trans-Newtonian elements in its highly sensitive receiver and powerful computers. The machine is a marvel of engineering. It weighs more than a tank platoon. Once its central dish has unfurled itself it can listen for infrared emissions from the depths of space, or pass over part of a world and look for pinpoint heat sources. Even the buttons and switches on its controls are made of a totally new plastic, shiny, strong, and lightweight. It outputs information to a bank of CRT monitors which can be switched through different display modes, so that an operator can see what the machine “sees” in reddish tones, or view statistical readouts of the distance and intensity of the thermal sources detected by the machine. Those monitors have shown us that there is something hot on the Martian surface, or many somethings. I watched over Rosario’s shoulder as the information came in. Many of the heat sources were intermittent. “Here,” I said, tapping my finger against the glass at a line of on-and-off heat sources coming from structures near the Pyramid, “why do you think they’re doing that?” “Could be a repeated process, like an industrial assembly line.” Rosario answered. Then she continued the thought: “Or maybe a sort of safety valve for waste heat. Like at an oil refinery.” “Would that be so regular?” I looked around. Without thrust we had no gravity, so I was holding on to a metal ring that popped out of the sensor console, floating next to Rosario’s chair. Every member of my crew was there; the other seats on the ship’s circular command deck were fully occupied, save for the one I’d pushed myself out of to float over to the sensor console, and those who couldn’t get seats were floating near the ceiling. No one had wanted to miss the moment we reached the Red Planet and began scanning. My eyes went “up” from my perspective and found Alstrom, one of Rosario’s technicians. He was craning his neck to see the screens in the sensor panel, though for him they were upside down. “Comrade Alstrom, you worked at a refinery. Are those fires on the flare towers regular?” He shrugged. “Sometimes, Comrade Officer. Sometimes not. But who knows? I don’t think there’s an oil refinery down there.” I had to admit that he had a point. We were getting a lot of information just from the FESTER arrays, but not enough to quickly tell what was going on. It was all being beamed back to Earth, of course, and the analysts there would be able to go over it for as long as they wanted. But if we wanted to understand more, we would have to bring one of the ships down and suit up. And there was no way to predict what would be waiting for us. I thought again about the locker in the equipment storage module that held the only twelve pieces of equipment that were completely familiar, a dozen machines made of perfectly ordinary mundane metal that we had carried in our wondrous spaceship all the way to the frontiers of human experience. Machines we might carry to encounter an extraterrestrial intelligence. I had checked them all before we set out and, out of curiosity, looked up the serial numbers. They were all from the same batch, from the Izhevsk production line in the early 1950s. Probably they had sat in a crate until someone sent them to Ascension Island. They had sent us to meet Martians with Makarov nine-millimeter pistols.
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Dec 17, 2020 08:28
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Veloxyll posted:if things go ploin shaped Of course, if I’d known what was really waiting for me down there, I’d have turned around and gotten myself as far away as possible.
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Dec 28, 2020 03:24
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Good to hear! He should take his time and come back when he’s ready.
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Feb 6, 2021 03:27
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Hype hype hype
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Feb 8, 2021 11:21
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I hope somebody on my crew brought a camera. Even a little Zorki 35mm handheld.
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Feb 10, 2021 04:10
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I think it’s reasonable to answer the year and to give a few answers about ourselves, since the men from Cyclops and the U-Boat will have already started noticing certain things and deducing others: it’s been a long time, we have manned space flight now, I am commanding a Russian-speaking crew of mixed origin (even if all our communications among the crew are by radio, our suits are not free of insignia or lettering). Detailed political questions can wait, and I’ll try my best to defer them, other than to confirm what they probably suspect, that the war is over and none of us are each other’s enemies. These men can undergo political education during the quarantine period I expect to follow their return to Earth. I am curious about several points here, and attempt to verify for myself or ask the abductees for information, while documenting as much as possible. 1. Is the Cyclops still carrying a load of manganese ore? I’m not suggesting the alien intelligence behind this situation was committing piracy, but I want to check. 2. The alien skeletons that were atop the, let’s go ahead and call it the Hanging Gardens as comrade Asterite suggests: I am assuming their wounds were not consistent with conventional gunshot wounds. I take it these have been consigned to the empty drydock along with the rest, but if possible, any skeletons with injuries are a priority for photography. 3. My understanding so far is that the crew of the Cyclops and the U-Boat were released from the tubes as a unit, all at the same time, and that no members of either crew are still in tubes. This suggests that the alien intelligence saw them as a single batch (reasonable). Were the tubes they slept in all together, or is the tube room not so organized as that? Relatedly, when walking through the tube room, can we see what looks like any other groups? Uniforms would be ideal. 4. Is there any indication of why the group was released when they were?
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Feb 11, 2021 02:35
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Oh yeah! One more thing about the tubes. Mister Bates posted:The team didn't have time to look at them in much detail, but nearly all of them are apparently full, almost all of them with humans. Emphasis mine. So, uh, what’s in the ones that are full but not with humans?
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Feb 11, 2021 08:02
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Live as far as we know, at least. And for now we have no idea how to get them out while keeping them that way. Any more sightings of the Martian Zeppelin? How frequently did the Cydonia abductees see it before (i.e. is its absence now notable)?
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Feb 11, 2021 10:04
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Once things become public—as they surely will eventually—we should take this situation as an opportunity to affirm that some traditional laws of the sea, the duty to assist vessels and persons in distress, also apply in space. I don’t know if we and the Hawaiians have worked out any such thing between us already, but if we feel bound to aid these abductees and even to treat the alien individuals as potentially friendly and eligible for our assistance, then we should affirm that this is precedent for the future. I assume UNCLOS did not happen in this timeline.
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Feb 13, 2021 02:42
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I stand corrected. So yeah, something to think about for the oceans and for space travel.
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Feb 13, 2021 07:09
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They say they don’t want a new Cold War, but that’s likely what we’ll get if we say yes. They clearly view us as a threat, while (allowing for disagreement within the huge and disparate Comintern) our attitude towards them is at best suspicious. That won’t go away if we bring them into the Trans-Newtonian space age with us. At the same time, if we say no, it buys us a war of some kind. I think if we don’t reject them outright we should do our best to promote this as a gesture towards the United Nations and not towards Japan directly.
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Feb 16, 2021 11:03
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I don’t think war is a good idea, especially not at this time. Incidentally, if we share information about Mars with Japan, are we prepared for them to demand access to the facility as well?
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Feb 16, 2021 11:51
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Sanev.Khan posted:Then we tell them to stick their proposition where the sun don't bloody shine and come back to them when we have TN anti-missile ships, stations or troops. The logic of deterrence comes into play here—if they see us building missile defenses and recognize that their advantage could be erased, they’ll see it as a sign of our plans to attack and use the weapons while they still can.
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Feb 16, 2021 11:55
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Pirate Radar posted:I think if we don’t reject them outright we should do our best to promote this as a gesture towards the United Nations and not towards Japan directly. To go back to this, my reasoning comes from a concern that if this is a Comintern-Japan bilateral thing, it will make it out like they’re right, Comintern nations are vassals of a larger power instead of being equal members. We may not like the UN but dealing Comintern-UN would avoid portraying Japan as on equal status to the whole Comintern.
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Feb 16, 2021 13:20
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Antilles posted:From Mister Bates' post it sounds like Japan's got the UN by the balls, not sure it'd do more than superficial PR. Also not sure we should contribute to reviving the UN by officially acknowledging it, it might be better to let it fade into obscurity like all the other odious elements of the old world. Yeah, it’s not a perfect solution. I need to think of a way—assuming we aren’t doing World War IV—to frame it politically so that we don’t say the Japanese are right about the nature of the Comintern while still keeping it acceptable to them. Doubtless, of course, there will be domestic criticism in our member nations of any effort to work in cooperation with a capital-E Empire.
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Feb 16, 2021 15:00
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I brought this up in the discord but I want to say here that Japan seems pretty clear that this arrangement won’t just be about ships. They see the power imbalance between us as a problem. If it gets too big they will feel pressured to act while they still can, and they’re willing to threaten war in order to extract things from us. But if (unlikely as it seems) in the future they grew stronger, they’d start thinking of acting to end the threat they see in us. So our deal with them is, explicitly or not, a commitment to maintaining the current ratio of strength between the socialist and capitalist spheres. That means that if we got armed spacecraft in the future, they’d want armed spacecraft. They will want access to the Martian facility. If we discover a “hyperdrive” sometime in the future—right now the idea is science fiction, but the presence of alien spacecraft in our solar system effectively proves its existence in some form—the Japanese will demand to be provided access as well. Our way out of this is, long-term, to attempt to bring about a socialist revolution within Japan, but that in itself is dangerous, since the current Japanese leadership would see that as an attack. We can probably push them to some extent without triggering a war, but are we prepared for a scenario in which the Japanese government says “if the current social order is disrupted, the nukes start going off”?
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Feb 17, 2021 04:12
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Asterite34 posted:Fair enough, and that's not a BAD stance to have, but good Lord I feel like I'm being gaslighted with multiple mutually exclusive extremist views one after another for the past two days, often from the same people hours apart. Wait! That’s it! What if we gaslight Japan?
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Feb 17, 2021 16:15
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Will any potential deal with Japan include provisions on the militarization of space? If we decide to build a space navy in the future, I doubt they’ll accept letting us be the only ones with armed voidcraft. But we also don’t want them to suddenly build such craft and have a leg up on us.
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Feb 18, 2021 03:43
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zanni posted:I think that's something we need to broach when the time comes, honestly I strongly prefer it to be included in the first round of agreements. If we have no space weapons, they should commit to not building them either. If we want weapons, we can expect them to get them as well. Either way it helps everyone for us to be clear about what we are doing and why. I haven’t been posting with a clear character voice as far as these negotiations go (I think my officer character is still in the Proton somewhere on or around Mars, and wouldn’t be involved in the internal discussions anyway) but speaking fully out of character, any warship in Aurora is a strategic weapon by the standards of the 20th century. Even the basic rail gun ships we’ve talked about can be pointed down and used to delete enemy ground structures, theoretically without any warning. That’s to say nothing of missiles, which are canonically all nuclear warheads.
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Feb 18, 2021 05:13
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We should shoot something with a mass driver. Anything really.
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Feb 19, 2021 06:39
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Were any of the “attacker” bodies found inside the compound, or were they only outside? At very least we seem to have recovered a great deal of Roswell technology here.
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Feb 22, 2021 03:08
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If we’ve researched the techs for it, we might as well research an actual railgun model. And if we’re researching an actual model, we might as well start planning out a ship that would carry it. And if we plan out a ship that would carry it, we might as well...
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Mar 1, 2021 13:02
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Question of the day: has she been there the whole time (as in, abandoned or dead for years) or has she just been hiding there while we’ve been looking for her?
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Jul 7, 2021 10:38
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Does anyone with pertinent submarine knowledge know if that boat can transmit or receive messages from that depth?
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Jul 7, 2021 14:30
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Mister Bates posted:call them You used to call me on my sub phone Late night when you demand my surrender call me on my sub phone late night when you demand my surrender
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Jul 12, 2021 14:34
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Mister Bates posted:sending Fox Mulder and a bunch of dolphins to go do LSD on Mars and trip balls at alien ruins in the hopes of understanding them better God, I've never wanted anything more.
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Oct 3, 2021 16:37
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Telsa Cola posted:As an IRL archaeologist, having untrained people poke around and do archaeology things is 100% going to lead to a bunch of poo poo being destroyed and a bunch of data being lost. So keep that in mind. Oh, is it a good idea? Of course not. But the thought of Fox Mulder and a skeptical talking dolphin poking and prodding the mysteries of the cosmos has an undeniable je ne sais *dolphin noise*
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Oct 4, 2021 11:08
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paragon1 posted:Armed Spacecraft Proposal As this is the first time we’re trying to design a ship, do we want to pass a more specific request for designs from our shipyards and theorists? We would want to know its intended role, expected mission profiles, desired capabilities… etc.
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Dec 3, 2021 03:43
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Antilles posted:Don't forget that based on previous legislation we're civilian in nature and we've a defensive/not shooting first doctrine. It seems to me we should plan/design/build a space coast guard, not a space navy. If we need sleek and pure killing machines, isn't it possible to build ground-based fighters that can scramble into space if necessary? Indeed it’s possible. The heavy fighter already proposed, for instance, would have to operate from a planet with maintenance and crew facilities. Whether this means the fighters are ground-based and launch to orbit or are just sitting around an orbital starbase is a matter of thread fluff and our imaginations.
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Dec 3, 2021 04:42
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I hadn’t looked closely at the text of FALX when it came up and I have a clarifying question. quote:comprising at least ten craft capable of engaging and defeating a similar size force of the crashed Grey ships Here, does “a similar size force” mean “ten” or does it mean that the force should try to achieve qualitative parity? If we build 15 they should be able to take on 15 of the Grey ships, if we build 20… you get the idea.
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Dec 3, 2021 06:36
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sebmojo posted:The latter, my syntax was a bit tangled. I thought that's what it meant, I just hoped it wasn't a call for qualitative parity! I'm not sure I've achieved that, so these designs may be called unsuitable. (skip to the end for designs) * TRÈS SECRET DÉFENSE Dear Delegates, The attached documents discuss the theoretical background for armed spacecraft up to the limit of our current understanding. They have been prepared by a group of military and technical experts for your consideration. ----------------------------------- 1. The spacecraft recovered by the Americans and the evidence available on the Martian surface make it clear, beyond reasonable doubt, that advanced combat has taken place within our solar system. The Roswell craft (Object A) gives us a foundation on which to base our expectations for the capabilities of extraterrestrial military craft, whose existence is confirmed but whose intentions are as yet unknown to the human race. 2. However, there is no previous body of human experience upon which to base our expectations for the nature of space combat. Therefore we have attempted to assemble pieces of knowledge taken from aerial and naval combat together with our present understanding of space travel and extraterrestrial military technology. 3. We have had to assemble the terminology with which this subject can be discussed at the same time as assembling said knowledge; therefore, we have found ourselves using a mix of aerial and naval terminology. These terms may be regarded as placeholders for the time being. 3.1. Finding that TNE equipment, while highly capable, is typically much larger and heavier than conventional equipment, we have concluded that even the smallest viable armed spacecraft will be much larger than currently existing conventional military aircraft. We have decided on the following set of terms. 3.1.1. An armed spacecraft massing up to 250 tons is a fighter. This is roughly five times the size of the largest current atmospheric fighter, the Tupolev-128 interceptor. 3.1.1.1. We do not believe that our current technology allows us to construct a militarily viable spacecraft of this size. 3.1.2. An armed spacecraft massing between 250 and 500 tons is a heavy fighter. This is larger than most current military aircraft, comparable only to the American “Galaxy” cargo aircraft or to Alexeyev’s larger ground-effect designs (we are told that the Americans dubbed the largest one the “Caspian Sea Monster”). 3.1.2.1. We believe that a design of this size is possible, and present one below. 3.1.3. An armed spacecraft massing between 500 and 1000 tons is a fast attack craft. Conventional naval ships of this mass have proven highly successful while remaining affordable and simple to operate. 3.1.3.1. We believe that a design of this size is possible, and present one below. 3.1.4. Spacecraft above this size are subject to considerable uncertainty and debate. Their existence has been postulated, due to the belief that Object A relied on a “mothership” or carrier of some kind, but it is unknown if this mothership was also a combatant or if it was intended only for logistical support. There is general agreement that the smallest armed spacecraft above 1000 tons should be called a corvette, but we lack the information and experience necessary to make any solid predictions above the 1000-ton range. 3.1.4.1. We are not presenting designs above this size in this document for a variety of reasons. 3.1.4.1.1. We lack experience with building and crewing armed spacecraft of any size. Larger craft are more complex to command and control. 3.1.4.1.2. We expect that a large warship might be more politically disruptive than a small one. 3.1.4.1.3. We believe that with present technology a larger ship does not offer sufficient advantages to be worth the cost, especially compared to potentially building more of a smaller design. 4. We have attempted to estimate the capabilities that Object A had when it was in one piece, and have spent significant time carrying out physical and computer simulations of combat between examples of Object A, and between Object A and our potential human-built spacecraft. For the programming of these simulations we owe a debt to our software engineer Mr. Walmsley, without whom we would have been stuck rolling a great number of dice and keeping track of everything on paper. 5. For weaponry, we have assumed that the newly developed EXCALIBUR railgun is the armament of choice. We have given due consideration to missile armament, keeping in mind that we believe Object A to have been armed with missiles. However, we are aware that arming spacecraft with nuclear missiles is a politically sensitive topic, and are not presenting any missile-armed designs at this time. 6. We have concluded that speed is a key factor for the effectiveness and longevity of an armed spacecraft, especially against missile-armed spacecraft such as Object A. Due to expected engineering concerns, the railguns of our theoretical spacecraft are mounted longitudinally, so the whole craft must spin in order to traverse the gun. High speed therefore increases weapon accuracy. 7. In designing our theoretical craft, we have felt obligated to begin with the weapons, in effect, designing the spacecraft around the guns. We therefore view each of the following designs as “weapon systems”; each supporting system is intended to aid in the central task of getting the weapon into a firing position. The core components of the weapons system--the gun and its supporting reactor--are the same in both designs, and you will notice their obvious visual similarity. 7.1. Concept Alpha is a “Heavy Fighter”, though it might be better to imagine it as a heavy bomber, with its crew of 19. It should reach up to 2500 kilometers per second, and has very limited endurance. It could reach Luna any time it wanted, but could only cross the void to Mars during certain periods of planetary alignment. Due to space constraints, its active sensors are short-ranged, but are aimed at detecting small objects such as incoming missiles. Simulations give it a 25% chance of hitting a target traveling twice its speed (5000 km/s), and as its railgun fires four shots per burst, we consider this manageable. It can be produced on Earth’s surface with existing or quickly adaptable facilities.  7.2. Design Study 001 is a fast attack craft, nearly twice Alpha’s mass. It carries the same weapon but is faster and longer-ranged. It can fly from Earth to Mars and back with enough fuel left over to pull combat maneuvers somewhere along the way. It has also been given an additional, longer-ranged active sensor and an additional layer of armor for survivability. Its greater speed gives it a slightly higher chance of hitting its target. On paper, it is far superior to Alpha, but it is more expensive to build and maintain, and will have to be built in orbit at one of our naval shipyards.  8. Of note for the future is that our designs have a bottleneck when it comes to capacitors. The EXCALIBUR railgun would be capable of firing twice as fast if its capacitors were improved; the current design cannot recharge fast enough to keep the gun firing at its maximum theoretical rate. Further research in this field will unlock new capabilities. 9. We expect that future technological developments, as well as practical experience with spacecraft construction and deployment, will inevitably obsolete these early designs, and that refits and revisions will take place in due course.
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Dec 3, 2021 13:56
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Asterite34 posted:Just because they don't throw fallout everywhere doesn't mean that ten seconds of sustained fire from this thing wouldn't be as devastating as any tactical nuke. To be fair “ten seconds” is one burst from these things, they can only shoot once every ten seconds with our current tech—that’s every other turn in game terms. If our capacitors were one step better we could shoot every turn, but the reactor would have to be a little bigger.
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Dec 4, 2021 05:29
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Affi posted:Once we have star wars up and running we should give them an ultimatum. Incidentally of course, for this exact reason, if they think we’re close to being able to neutralize their nuclear arsenal they have a strong incentive to use it before it becomes irrelevant.
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Dec 8, 2021 03:32
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