Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

[luculucu]

Dat feel when even 200 iq not enough for explaining to lower life forms, that thrusters must be plenty, pointing backwards, dakka point forward, and all wired to a single big red button you can smash.

 

[SemiSaneAuthor]

one of the single greatest scientific mind Humanity has ever produced

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I'd just like to note that is in the history of the galaxy as an addendum. Because the hostile Vilani Imperium hasn't had someone like this as far as they know.

Which makes it even worse.

 

[ltmauve]

Genius Patrol: "Alright, let's get her familiar with military technology. Being a sensor technician should give her ample things to engage her brain with and hopefully we'll get better sensor technology out of it."
Nowak: "So, who wants better FTL drives?"
Genius Patrol: "... how?"

Because what Nowak did for the terraforming was put four and four together to get 256. She's working for the terraforming project, so her spending all day pondering various parts of the project makes sense.
This is her hand-crafting five and five in a ship bunk from a box of scraps, and getting 3,125 out of it. Where is she getting the time and energy to think about jump drives enough to make that breakthrough?

Then once she's done working on "Jump-9" and the HPG, her minders will be expecting her to make something relating to that, and instead she'll release some new method of making steel using gravity manipulation (BT endo-steel.)
And that's assuming she didn't get a new perk that gives her the knowledge of something else more important.

 

[Taliesin]

Genius Patrol: "... how?"

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"Fuck you, I'm a genius, that's how." XD

 

[Domino]

Man, I feel like someone in command is going to blow a gasket about the MC's reaction to not being able to Science to her heart's content for the Navy being "Okay well I'm just gonna Science in my free time and, like, come up with radical new and superior jump drives, fusion plants and FTL communication system and go fishing for civilian backing, so neh!"

That'll show em!

EDIT -Ah! I see I wasn't the only one to have this reaction.

 

[James Wilt]

Would any part of the SDS, a networked and automated defense system consisting of among other things fleets of drones both fighter and capitol ship sized, be useful?

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Well the Castle Brian's alone would be worth it, as they aren't easy to break open. Through in the things like the CASPAR Drones? Especially without the glaring weaknesses? Woo Boy, no one's gonna be bothering your system anytime soon...

Not to mention any upgrades they would implement, especially as Sophia gains even more tech from The Forge.(Like a certain jailbroken pipboy...)

Btw, who has the better energy weapons, Traveller or Battle tech?

 

[Blade4]

Mind you once the confederacy realize what is happening the whole project is going to be top secret anyway. It's to valuable to let fall into empire hands so stays strictly controlled tech.

 

[luculucu]

Dat feel, when you glance at sophias board, and see design for a lobotomised human torso, with a giant roomba instead of legs, and a soap dispenser, taking place of a left lung...

 

[EntropyEnginear]

Well I guess it helps that a lot of this tech is extremely hard to reverse engineer from starting principles. So only way for the other guys to get it is through espionage and it doesn't seem like they do that sort of thing.

 

[Bloodalchemy]

Mind you once the confederacy realize what is happening the whole project is going to be top secret anyway. It's to valuable to let fall into empire hands so stays strictly controlled tech.

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Ya, that's clearly going to be the end result. But that will after she meets a bunch of smart and highly paid civilian R&D types that help her build a prototype and understand the her math themselves.

This won't be simple NDAs for a few unconnected scientists. This would be the military forcing effectively the entire R&D department of a massive megacorp to silence.

There are going to be a lot of people with a bunch of stars on their hats wondering why they are being forced to throw their weight around.

 

[Ralyx]

For the first time since I'd gotten the Forge I had enough accumulated CP to afford the 600-point options, not that I'd had any time to consult the Forge during the past six months of constant training...

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Nice chapter overall, but this bit right here felt like a glaringly awful and utterly nonsensical contrivance that managed to contradict several key points that you had already established.

Firstly, the time it takes Sophia to 'consult the Forge'. You established in the first chapter that this takes minutes, not hours. Hells, in this very scene she goes and checks it mid-conversation. Pretending like she couldn't find a few spare minutes in six months is silly, especially when you explicitly stated that her officer training was only twelve hours per day, six days per week.

Secondly, you have stressed multiple times that Forge options randomly cycle in and out of availability, which was a large factor in her choice to buy the nanobots when she did. If I was reading this chapter's Achievements right, she had 600 CP right after she was drafted, so it would be majorly out-of-character for her not to check her available options for six entire months.

Thirdly, even if we were to assume that she literally had no spare time at all for the last six months, there's still the matter of the universe-mandated, week-long downtime involved with every hyperspace jump she took to travel from Terra.

Though speaking of the cosmic time-out corner, it would be pretty cool and hilarious if Sophia worked out a way to weaponize the effect. How small of a drive could you manage if you weren't intending to send the target any distance at all?

 

[hyperspacewizard]

Loving the story can't wait to see what other things she can combo together with the different tech trees that and the fallout of her inventions are going to be the things I'm most looking forward too.

 

[crazygrox]

Well the Castle Brian's alone would be worth it, as they aren't easy to break open. Through in the things like the CASPAR Drones? Especially without the glaring weaknesses? Woo Boy, no one's gonna be bothering your system anytime soon...

Not to mention any upgrades they would implement, especially as Sophia gains even more tech from The Forge.(Like a certain jailbroken pipboy...)

Btw, who has the better energy weapons, Traveller or Battle tech?

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I feel like Traveller already had castle brian equivalents.
Though I've only read the wiki, I remember that the weapons which terra developed to finalize the defeat of the vilani centuries from now were noteworthy because you could dig them so far under a planet's crust that they would be basically impossible to target without similar weapons, yet without the crust in the way interfering with passage of energy beam in any appreciable way(with the energy just seeming to appear inside of the target after them beam weapon pointed their way, to anyone who doesn't understand the tech).
According to the wiki the best method to counter planetary emplacements using more primitive weapons was to target surface sensors or heat blooms indicative of powerplants that could be fueling large batteries of these weapons(which is of dubious use against geothermal power, though that might not be great for maximum-rate fire).

 

[cliffc999]

Firstly, the time it takes Sophia to 'consult the Forge'. You established in the first chapter that this takes minutes, not hours. Hells, in this very scene she goes and checks it mid-conversation. Pretending like she couldn't find a few spare minutes in six months is silly, especially when you explicitly stated that her officer training was only twelve hours per day, six days per week.

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It's not that she didn't have enough time to look at the Forge during training, it's that anything she did buy during training would have sat being unused for months anyway because she didn't have any spare time to work on projects. Even on shipboard she at least had some hours off to work on math.

According to the wiki the best method to counter planetary emplacements using more primitive weapons was to target surface sensors or heat blooms indicative of powerplants that could be fueling large batteries of these weapons(which is of dubious use against geothermal power, though that might not be great for maximum-rate fire).

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Meson cannons, which can shoot through any thickness of matter at any point within several light seconds.

And the way you dealt with deep planetary meson gun installations was to take out any surface installation that could be spotting for them, because the weapon still had to be aimed and even if the gun can shoot through a mile of bedrock, the gunner damn sure can't see through it. And, of course, sensor arrays capable of locking onto a starship light-seconds away are not small enough to be easily or cheaply hidden... especially not the ones that use active sensors.

 

[Prince Chrom]

They can also use ramscoops to skim sufficient hydrogen out of a gas giant's upper atmosphere, and 'fuel scooping' is the traditional method of 'in the wilderness' fuel replenishment for warships on long expeditions. And I'm pretty sure that's more witchcraft than Battletech.

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Yeah, Traveller engines can be fuelled using just about anything.

 

[A/N]

I rubbed my chin in thought as I mentally opened the menu and went looking for anything that was useful for breaking my current deadlock. For the first time since I'd gotten the Forge I had enough accumulated CP to afford the 600-point option

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This makes no sense.

Nice chapter overall, but this bit right here felt like a glaringly awful and utterly nonsensical contrivance that managed to contradict several key points that you had already established.

Firstly, the time it takes Sophia to 'consult the Forge'. You established in the first chapter that this takes minutes, not hours. Hells, in this very scene she goes and checks it mid-conversation. Pretending like she couldn't find a few spare minutes in six months is silly, especially when you explicitly stated that her officer training was only twelve hours per day, six days per week.

Secondly, you have stressed multiple times that Forge options randomly cycle in and out of availability, which was a large factor in her choice to buy the nanobots when she did. If I was reading this chapter's Achievements right, she had 600 CP right after she was drafted, so it would be majorly out-of-character for her not to check her available options for six entire months.

Thirdly, even if we were to assume that she literally had no spare time at all for the last six months, there's still the matter of the universe-mandated, week-long downtime involved with every hyperspace jump she took to travel from Terra.

Though speaking of the cosmic time-out corner, it would be pretty cool and hilarious if Sophia worked out a way to weaponize the effect. How small of a drive could you manage if you weren't intending to send the target any distance at all?

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^beat me to it, well said.

It's not that she didn't have enough time to look at the Forge during training, it's that anything she did buy during training would have sat being unused for months anyway because she didn't have any spare time to work on projects. Even on shipboard she at least had some hours off to work on math.

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This again makes no sense. She's hardly limited to immediately applicable choices. She should be checking the Forge options every time they change, and every time she gets more points, because it takes almost no time, but the potential reward is huge if there's a spectacular new option available. Because it's already established that the choices change, and there could be something incredible. Like this time.

You want long periods of no new purchases, that's fine. Easy solution would be to instead have a line or so about her not finding anything particularly useful and so waiting and saving her precious points for something better to come along.

Sidenote, not sure if it was just me, but at first I thought this new perk was about apocalypse-proofing tech. Just by the name. The implications later made me conclude this was a new techbase perk, but it's not clear in-story how broad or narrow it is beyond the FTL.

 

[cliffc999]

This makes no sense.

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What the heck 'makes no sense' about it? That is literally the first time since she got the Forge that she had 600 or more banked CP all at the same time.

This again makes no sense. She's hardly limited to immediately applicable choices. She should be checking the Forge options every time they change, and every time she gets more points

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You mean the thing that she didn't do at any point between being drafted and graduating OCS?

Contrary to the usual Celestial Forge story where the protag has CP rain down from the sky in a constant stream, I have choked Sophia's CP feed very tightly, precisely so that I can actually have time pass in the story without a runaway exponential snowball.

As is, I just bought a full Battletech tech database, and that by itself is setting breaking. I could honestly turn the Forge OFF at this point and still have enough options to explore to make an entire story out of. Not that I intend to do that, but seriously. She is not suffering from lack of buying stuff, so the constant complaints she should be buying more stuff faster make me scratch my head.

Ultimately, this story is my second attempt at experimenting with the Celestial Forge format. And like all experiments, not everything you try works the first time. We'll see how it goes from here.

 

[Potato and Chip]

cliffc999 I forgot, but apparently there are smaller HPG's. Mobile HPGs are 12 ton mobile communication trucks that are HPG capable. They aren't just a mobile HPG, they're an entire command station and its staff. Granted Battletech lightweight magic materials are probably part of the reason why the vehicle only weighs 12 tons but that still points to the HPG it carries being a manageable size. That said, they're also the most advanced model of HPG so its something Sophia might not have the tools to build on her own.

How is Traveler on power armor? Battletech has some pretty decent power armor and while they don't have backpack fusion engines their batteries are good enough for power armor to run off of batteries for 24 hours of continuous use and recharge at vehicles or mobile human sized fusion recharge stations. That said, the way Battletech works any sort of power armor knowledge Sophia releases might just consist of releasing a "do it yourself guide on power armor" instead of releasing copies of Innersphere designs. Battletech is all for designing your own machines after all, which Sophia might find useful. Rather then having to build a style of armor for every need she could just let the rest of the Confederation do it.

"Best-case scenario, they think they've got time to wait and see what I can do on a schedule they can understand." I replied at least as much for the audience as for my folks, because now that I was on ONI's radar there was a nontrivial possibility this house was bugged. "And as much as it chafes my shorts to mark time like this, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong. As they see it the Confederation needs technological breakthroughs soon, but doesn't need them immediately. And while our R&D has been proceeding at a remarkable pace over the past generation by historical standards, you still haven't heard anything about teenaged supergeniuses revolutionizing the entire tech tree, have you?"

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I get why high command might be doing this. Someone saw her "I need to save the commonwealth" thing and either decided she needed her ego checked or thought such an assignment would give her a more grounded view. Or maybe someone thought she would be easier to control with more discipline after being part of a ship's command structure. Either way all of her work has mostly been theoretical by this point, I mean how much damage could one super math genius do while unsupervised for a few months...

... Is going to be the starting line of many lectures on how not to handle super geniuses in future Genius Patrol lectures.

That said I would find it hilarious if this was the Genius Patrol dropping the ball again. With most people "in the know" assuming she was assigned to R/D somewhere while in reality her file is so "need to know" it doesn't even tell you that things on her file are redacted unless you "need to know" meaning the people who decide who goes where looked at her file, saw only the things they were allowed to see, and then assigned her this assignment because it looked like she was "at least decent with computers".

Or maybe the various scientists in charge of the R/D departments weren't cleared to see her accomplishments, so they rejected her for better candidates. I could see command putting forth Sophia as highly recommended, some researcher seeing her file stripped of all her accomplishments beyond ones the Confederation thinks is safe to release, rolling their eyes at such "blatant nepotism" or "higher ups not knowing what kind of people we want", and then rejecting her for someone with a graduate degree.

I look forward to learning whether this is higher ups not realizing just what they have on their hands yet or if this is another bureaucratic fumble.

I purchased the perk without hesitation and let the knowledge flow into my mind, and inwardly cursed. Yes, the K-F drive vastly outranged either Confederation or Vilani jump drive - but it also required much larger drives. The smallest JumpShip practical to build with Battletechnology was 2500 dtons in size... and that was a scout, the setting's equivalent to our Navy's 100 dton Crockett-class picket ship. The average size of a BT JumpShip was measured in hunrdeds of thousands of dtons. You could literally jump the collective tonnage of the entire 11th Fleet with one K-F drive, assuming you built a large enough JumpShip to fit all of 11th fleet's cruiser squadrons on the booms. Which might come in handy someday, but also meant that I'd have to convince someone to make an ungodly huge investment in prototype research just to prove this thing worked at all.

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Actually this sounds like it might result in a revolution in stellar economics. I don't know how many worlds the Confederation has, but it sounds like jumpships have the potential to become the cargo ships of space. Imagine being able to transport the equivalent of an entire fleet between two worlds every 16 days (jump, 8 days to recharge, jump back, 8 days to recharge again) and thats without recharge stations. Imagine how much cheaper transport and travel would be with something like this available.

It would be like the invention of the train all over again. Sure it'd be expensive to build, but the amount of money you'd make on the first trip alone would be insane.

The KF drive also helped keep a steller nation roughly 1000 light years in diameter consisting of 2000 worlds together. Maybe the second empire won't fall this time with that kind of logistical support.

Battletech had started out as a late 20th-century miniatures wargame involving impractically large mecha fighting each other in a post-apocalyptic interstellar future. The only reason I knew of it is because the 21st-century computer games built on the franchise had gotten a brief revival when I was in primary-ed. Something about going out in a giant robot to stomp on other giant robots with giant laser guns still appealed, even in the 22nd century. But it hadn't been a very big revival, and were it not for my Forge-augmented memory I'd likely have never even brought to mind. I certainly wouldn't have recalled enough details from having played one of the computer games to know whyI absolutely had to buy this the instant it became available.

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I wonder if people will ever realize she's inventing things from fiction? Wouldn't that be hilarious, an entire room of people playing video games, reading books, and watching movies. Taking notes on fictional techs to be slyly presented to Sophia in the hopes that she'll be inspired to make them.

Who knows, maybe the government will start sponsoring sci-fi writers.

Hahaha. The fun is when the brain patrol is called on the carpet by their higher ups and asked to please explain why they put what turns out to be one of the single greatest scientific mind Humanity has ever produced in a expendable ship on the front lines when they knew she was a r&d focused genius with the credentials to back it up. I mean yeah this was probably to buy time to study her and give her experience but sweet titty fuck in hindsight this is gonna look bad.

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Yeah, if a private corporation gets their hands on this FTL method... I don't think heads will roll, but a couple people will be getting a screaming lecture by a red faced superior who looks like they're seconds away from a popped blood vessel. Its not like what they did is the wrong way to approach Sophia, but shit rolls down hill and nobody will be happy that the Confederation government didn't have full rights to this tech to solidify their authority over their new government.

Their superiors won't say, "Its okay, nobody could have known she was capable of this." they'll be screaming, "How the fuck did you not know she was capable of this?!"

 

[IsaacTheAutobot1229]

I think they are more confused at how she never once did it until then since she had to have had at least a few minutes to herself at some point over 6+ months. I just chalked it up to her not finding anything useful enough to justify buying. Also, can we get the description for that perk?

 

[crazygrox]

It's not that she didn't have enough time to look at the Forge during training, it's that anything she did buy during training would have sat being unused for months anyway because she didn't have any spare time to work on projects. Even on shipboard she at least had some hours off to work on math.

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I'd been assuming that the 'hadn't had the time' comment was her mentally deflecting from having forgotten while she was busy, then kept putting it off whenever she could have taken the opportunity to do so(I've done that myself).
But if it's meant to be taken literally, 'shrug' I still don't have the strong negative reaction these people seem to, I'd also need to go back and check when exactly all of those points came in.

 

[cliffc999]

Also, can we get the description for that perk?

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Perk descriptions are collected in the 'Mechanics' post immediately after the introduction, as always.

 

[crazygrox]

How is Traveler on power armor? Battletech has some pretty decent power armor and while they don't have backpack fusion engines their batteries are good enough for power armor to run off of batteries for 24 hours of continuous use and recharge at vehicles or mobile human sized fusion recharge stations. That said, the way Battletech works any sort of power armor knowledge Sophia releases might just consist of releasing a "do it yourself guide on power armor" instead of releasing copies of Innersphere designs. Battletech is all for designing your own machines after all, which Sophia might find useful. Rather then having to build a style of armor for every need she could just let the rest of the Confederation do it.

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I think the wiki is indicating that power armor is available at a higher tech level than I think is entirely reasonable, and is above the current Terran tech level.

I get why high command might be doing this. Someone saw her "I need to save the commonwealth" thing and either decided she needed her ego checked or thought such an assignment would give her a more grounded view. Or maybe someone thought she would be easier to control with more discipline after being part of a ship's command structure. Either way all of her work has mostly been theoretical by this point, I mean how much damage could one super math genius do while unsupervised for a few months...

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I think the Genius patrol sent her here because they were worried she was heading towards a stress breakdown. Possibly they saw her emotional disquiet in the aftermath of the nanotech incident/leading up to it while she was stressing over what might be possible, even if she concealed the actual research and purge successfully.
So they sent her out here to reconnect to her social support structure in her parents, and maybe have the idea that not everything is depending on her by a mixture of being made to sit and spin her wheels for a while/get some training in teamwork in a small warship crew.
I imagine these small crews are closer-knit and less hierarchical than bigger warship crews, so if they picked one that doesn't have any hazing associated with entry into that close-knit group beyond the actual training, and which would keep her near her parents, it might have been intended to be good for her once her schedule calmed down after the initial training.

 

[IsaacTheAutobot1229]

Perk descriptions are collected in the 'Mechanics' post immediately after the introduction, as always.

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Sorry, I forgot that was where you put it. Also wow, she now has an entire civilization's techbase from the ground up in her head from what I am interpreting. That has to encompass so many things including stuff like the Nighthawk armor, the HPG, the damn dimension tap fusion reactors, and everything. I imagine with how ludicrously rugged battletech stuff is it could be introduced to a vast number of fields and industries to great success since anyone in spaceships, stations, or colonies would want something like that.

 

[A/N]

What the heck 'makes no sense' about it? That is literally the first time since she got the Forge that she had 600 or more banked CP all at the same time.


You mean the thing that she didn't do at any point between being drafted and graduating OCS?

Contrary to the usual Celestial Forge story where the protag has CP rain down from the sky in a constant stream, I have choked Sophia's CP feed very tightly, precisely so that I can actually have time pass in the story without a runaway exponential snowball.

As is, I just bought a full Battletech tech database, and that by itself is setting breaking. I could honestly turn the Forge OFF at this point and still have enough options to explore to make an entire story out of. Not that I intend to do that, but seriously. She is not suffering from lack of buying stuff, so the constant complaints she should be buying more stuff faster make me scratch my head.

Ultimately, this story is my second attempt at experimenting with the Celestial Forge format. And like all experiments, not everything you try works the first time. We'll see how it goes from here.

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Cheaper perks also exist.

Several times now she's received points, and there's not even been a hint of her checking the options available even with time skips.

I get wanting to limit the power creep and constrain the story, I really do. This is almost like creative mode in a jumpchain while trying to maintain the tension, if not nearly so extreme. If the situation merited it, why wouldn't the character just purchase a useful perk to save the day?

Here, the options are limited, the points are limited, but she still has them and can spend them at will. A single line about her wanting to save the points for something bigger or better than the options she's seeing would perfectly cover this. But currently, instead of that the in-story reason given is 'she never had time, for many months, when it takes a few minutes at most'.

I don't have a problem with this as a story thing, just that the in-story, in-character reasons could be dramatically improved very easily.


For any future Forge stories you want to explore limits, I have a few ideas? Maybe there's a total point limit, like a Jump, so they only get X number of points or perks and then the Forge moves on and they are stuck with what they have and need to make the most of it with no future deus ex machine but what they make.

Another idea, possibly in combination, would be that the choice or perk only arrives every X months or whatever time period. So there's no distractions between perks, just making the most of what they have and progressing the story until the next perk. Though this could incentivise turtling if the plot doesn't get the character involved.

Perk descriptions are collected in the 'Mechanics' post immediately after the introduction, as always.

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The perk could use a little more in-story description when she gets it, especially how broad it is. It is a little distracting no knowing the details or even general description of her new capabilities as she plans what to do with them.

 

[cliffc999]

Cheaper perks also exist.

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She wanted to get one of the 600cp options, so she saved up her cp until she had enough to buy one. At this point you are complaining not because of a plot hole, but because I'm not writing the plot that you would have written.

Several times now she's received points, and there's not even been a hint of her checking the options available even with time skips.

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There's also never been a hint of her using the restroom, but you can reasonably presume she still does so at regular intervals.

At this point I reluctantly conclude you're trying to do to this story what you've already done to several of my prior stories - find any possible excuse to complain at length, even if that requires entirely ignoring what you read. We're done talking now.

 

[SirBino]

Am I misreading this, or did Sophia not actually finish whatever bachelors degree she was going for at MIT? Because I really have to wonder about the genius squad taking her away from one of the best math/science/engineering schools on the planet before she has even a bachelor's degree, much less a master's or doctorate.

 

[cliffc999]

Am I misreading this, or did Sophia not actually finish whatever bachelors degree she was going for at MIT?

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She finished it. OCS requires either a college degree or prior enlisted experience.

 

[A/N]

She wanted to get one of the 600cp options, so she saved up her cp until she had enough to buy one. At this point you are complaining not because of a plot hole, but because I'm not writing the plot that you would have written.


There's also never been a hint of her using the restroom, but you can reasonably presume she still does so at regular intervals.

At this point I reluctantly conclude you're trying to do to this story what you've already done to several of my prior stories - find any possible excuse to complain at length, even if that requires entirely ignoring what you read. We're done talking now.

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...Then maybe actually put that in the story? It's even what I suggested as a possible explanation!

No, I now can't presume that she checks it regularly like I had been, because you blatantly wrote that she hadn't for six months because there'd been no time!

Cliff, that I raise issues with characterisation in a couple of your stories doesn't mean I'm looking for excuses to complain.

 

[Kahalah]

huh so She has access to all Clan tech/SLDF also, which can be a major game changer for the Terran. still would the Imperium be sending spies into the Terran space or are they too sure not to need to spy on the Terrans? either way if Imperium get wind of the advances could advance the war up years.

 

[IsaacTheAutobot1229]

Does your interpretation of the perk cover medical things such as stasis tubes well? I ask since from what I can tell looking online her universe does not have anything similar. I figure at least some higher-ups would consider using it as a last-ditch "put 'em on a sleeper ship to somewhere far away" apocalypse scenario option. After all, it's 1 day for the person inside for every year outside meaning 365 years for 1 year of aging. Not a bad deal for that kind of technology and with what she learned from the Ceph tech likely can be made a lot safer as well.