Re: How humanity can affect the war, by turning the moon into a deathstar.
Posted: Sun Aug 16, 2020 8:22 am
Laser arrays aside, why not?
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https://www.well-of-souls.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2512
Laser arrays aside, why not?
Because if you actually look at it, technological and scientific progress isn't so much pushed by individual geniuses but by the group producing said geniuses. Therefore it's unlikely that a whole culture just misses an obvious application of a technology. The longer the technology is in use, the less likely a continued oversight is.
Of course, but...
...I don't see how that follows. In any case, we can of course ignore for a second that technological and scientific progress is determined neither by brilliant individuals nor by groups of such individuals, but by challenges faced by the advancing society in practical venues and means available to solving those challenges, with challenges and means both being different in various civilizations, like how Deinar had no petrochemicals, or like how every non-human civilization in the Bubble is involved with a lot of precursor tech nudging them along in specific directions, or like how Sister Worlds developed orbital slight and then sat on it for centuries until their Farseers discovered each other - which would mean different technological foci and approaches among such societies even if everyone's thinking was exactly the same - and they explicitly don't. We can also not focus too much on the fact that this exact thing with continuously ignored technological applications happened dozens of times in the one RL example of technological progression that we have.
Because everyone just continuously screens past technologies - especially inapplicable and obsolete ones - for new applications. Just fine-combs them erryday.
Millennia of martial tradition cease to mean anything useful at all when the context of warfare changes. And it already changed for shells and blu elves - they've gotten themselves into a completely new kind of interstellar warfare, and the boundless wealth of their ancestral experience has only failed them so far. To the point that the current Azerein is noteworthy for going "alright fuck the thousand years of space warfare experience - this is a new thing, we gotta do it in a new way" so hard it sent a significant part of the Diadem into a fit of autistic screeching. And the Hierarchy is not far behind, what's with the current offensive and the emergence of Shell-that-Learns. They are all learning in a medium new to them now, perhaps more often restruicted by their past experience than helped by it, and dismissing the perspective of outsider upstarts leads down the path of
von Leeb wrote: Oh vould you kalm down, von Bock! What kan zis Aziatic horde of tekhnologikly backwards DER BAUERN pozzibly unterstant aboot das Deutsche wunderwaffe und jenius of VERNICHTUNGSKRIEG honed by ze centruries of Prussian kriegstradition?
The changes are in society and industry, not in how the war is actually waged.MK_C wrote:the current Azerein is noteworthy for going "alright fuck the thousand years of space warfare experience - this is a new thing, we gotta do it in a new way"
Yes, but with a very different incentive than it was, say, for humans. While having only the ones that were present for humans, they instead sat around with their thumbs up their asses.
Certainly. They just do it differently. Every society in canon does it differently - this difference is the reason for why Loroi fly on Floater drives shooting Delrias beams and Historian pulses.
I'm not sure academic process can be dissected like that.
Obviously it does matter. It matters a lot. Do you fancy that humans finding a non-working FTL drive before discovering it on their own would have no effect on how they eventually come around to understanding it? Reverse-engineering advanced tech does not just give you science points. It presents you with ready solutions, often to the questions you didn't even know how to ask, that you either take - and follow a new path different from the one you would've followed on your own - or reject, losing nearly all the potential gain from the artefact. If you take it, you will eventually uncover "all the surrounding technologies, industries, material sciences and underlying principles" - but that development will be guided towards a pre-determined solution, and thus will take a different path from a development that did not involve reverse-engineering. And yes - if the Union presents TCA with their tech, it will be an issue for the human academia.
There is no difference between those two. It's a total war, society and industry are as involved in the process as the front line is. There is nothing left that is not a part of the war machine in one way or another.
I mean, Loroi are supposedly capable of that already with Da Loom. All while the plasma stream doesn't exactly move at the velocity of light in vacuum, like a laser does. Obviously Da Loom itself would be very likely to miss a vessel doing evasive maneuvers at it's maximum range of 2 LS, as most targets would be entirely capable of evasion that turns their predicted trajectory for this kind of a shot into quite a cone, but from the abstractions we have from the Outsider adaptation of Attack Vector: Tactical, we can take that Da Loom has a somewhat like 1/2 hit chance against size 5 (superheavy) targets 1 LS away, and supposedly at least a 1/12 chance of hitting a similar size target 2 LS away (the to-hit table for beam weapon ranges doesn't go that far, and obviously at those ranges the damage goes way down, but still), all while Da Loom is not even mounted on a stabilized turret or anything - it's aimed by pivoting the whole bloody ship. Which makes sense - having some capability to pile hurt on huge targets from serious ranges is the whole reason for why Da Loom is a thing.Mjolnir wrote: ↑Sun Aug 16, 2020 2:46 pmKeep in mind that it's one thing to generate a laser beam capable of inflicting damage across light seconds of distance. It's quite a different matter to do so from a maneuvering warship that doesn't have hours to wait for vibrations to damp down after every movement, and to actually reliably hit a target at that distance.
Can't be much harder than focusing pulse cannons in a single battery on a single target within it's maneuvering cone. Much less a volley of pulse cannon shots from batteries on different nacelles. Which is like, standard procedure. They already manage to pretty much pin a fly to a wall from the next continent, seems reasonable that there wouldn't be much of a problem with pinning it specifically by the wing. A good portion of the beam can be occasionally (or frequently, at max ranges) out of focus, but that's okay - all the presented beam weapons have less than perfect chances of hitting at such ranges, and missing 9/10 shots is hardly a problem if you can keep taking dozens of shots while the enemy if forced to retaliate by glaring angrily. And as far as practicality goes Loroi already use a gun - namely Da Loom - that utilizes sweaty wall-slamming non-consensual and unlubricated intercourse with the firing ship's own energy and heat distribution systems as part of it's nominal operation, so...Mjolnir wrote: ↑Sun Aug 16, 2020 2:46 pmAnd for the incoherent laser array idea, you're asking to not only hit a target, but to precisely overlap the laser spots on the target's hull. I don't find it unreasonable for this to be beyond their capabilities, or to require so many tradeoffs that it becomes impractical to use in battle.
Werra wrote: ↑Sun Aug 16, 2020 8:47 amBecause if you actually look at it, technological and scientific progress isn't so much pushed by individual geniuses but by the group producing said geniuses. Therefore it's unlikely that a whole culture just misses an obvious application of a technology. The longer the technology is in use, the less likely a continued oversight is.
It can. The most prominent example for that is the believe that war is good for scientific advancement. Truth is, the scientific theories are developed in peacetime. In wartime, scientific progress usually stops in favor of applying the recent scientific discoveries to practical effects.
I would appreciate if you didn't chop up my sentences. That the Loroi didn't have a lot of working examples of technology is hugely important, as it means they still had to puzzle together the principles behind the technology and solve all engineering challenges of material sciences and industrial manufacturing themselves. Which is all part of the application of existing technology, for which we have no reason to assume that the Loroi are bad at. In fact, that they don't advance very quickly speaks to their care in exhausting possible applications before they move on to the next technology.Mk_C wrote: ↑Sun Aug 16, 2020 12:25 pm
Obviously it does matter. It matters a lot. Do you fancy that humans finding a non-working FTL drive before discovering it on their own would have no effect on how they eventually come around to understanding it? Reverse-engineering advanced tech does not just give you science points. It presents you with ready solutions, often to the questions you didn't even know how to ask, that you either take - and follow a new path different from the one you would've followed on your own - or reject, losing nearly all the potential gain from the artefact. If you take it, you will eventually uncover "all the surrounding technologies, industries, material sciences and underlying principles" - but that development will be guided towards a pre-determined solution, and thus will take a different path from a development that did not involve reverse-engineering. And yes - if the Union presents TCA with their tech, it will be an issue for the human academia.
Ok. If you don't see how a millenia old martial culture, with actual experience in interstellar warfare is a distinct advantage in an interstellar war, then you don't see it. That's fine, but I believe it to be a massive oversight of yours.
The Loroi have been happy to adopt technologies developed by their client species for centuries. As a whole, the Loroi military has proven itself to be very flexible and willing to adapt in the current war.Mk_C wrote: ↑Sun Aug 16, 2020 12:25 pmHowever well the Union manages on their own, they certainly have a lot to learn from other outsiders. Not just humans - Floaters, Barsam, Neridi probably could teach Loroi a lot themselves. But the latter don't seem to be inclined to listen to them, which might threaten them with eventual downfall.
Humans as a whole haven't missed stirrups for 6.000 years. You'd have to limit it to people that were in a position to field appreciable numbers of cavalry. Even amongst those, you'd have to cut out those whose circumstances prohibited the use of cavalry in heavy combat duties, such as nearly all Greek city states thanks to their rocky terrain or the Egyptians, thanks to their reliance on chariots or the Romans who delegated cavalry to scouting in favor of massed, heavy infantry. The rest was subject to a generally high turnover in ancient civilisations, which meant that a given people were likely only in the position to field stirruped cavalry in a way that benefitted them for maybe a century or so.
Exactly this if the Loroi and Umiak were so incompetent as to not come up with these ideas in the hundreds of years they've been fighting space wars, then they'd have almost certainly been topped already by someone who did come up with them. It'd be like a fantasy story where two empires are fighting war with tens of thousands of archers and the hero turns the tide by suggesting "maybe we should make the arrows pointy?"
The one that comes to mind is Niven's short story "Neutron Star", in which no one (including the ultra-tech Puppeteers) understands gravitational tides, even though humans have known about them since at least the 1960's when the story was written. In the story, reason offered is that the Puppeteer homeworld didn't have a large moon, and so they didn't ever understand tidal forces (not that this explains how humanity didn't know about it either). Niven later admitted that it was silly (and that the main character couldn't possibly have survived the scenario), and he retconned it when the story was collected into the Crashlander novel.Siber wrote: ↑Sun Aug 16, 2020 11:50 pmThis kind of plot turn is to me excusable in some cases, such as when a story is one of the first exploring that idea or intended to introduce an unfamiliar audience to it. A fair number of the classic sci-fi touchstone short stories were like this. But as a plot point in a story like Outsider it'd make me roll my eyes out of my head.
But this time MBehave dug out a friggin lazzor array, and he himself noted that it would explicitly not work within the setting.Arioch wrote: ↑Sun Aug 16, 2020 9:04 pmWe've been all up and down this tree before.
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2409&p=34761#p34761
Dumbest, maybe. But it's also aggressively hilarious. And reality's wonder is at it's peak when it proves how it can work out in ways that are infinitely dumber than the limits of our imagination could ever fathom. In any case, as I noted myself - this sort of stuff does not seem to fit the plot anyhow. If our protagonist ever does make some sort of a personal wide-effect impact on the Union's practices, I'd rather suspect that it would be something cultural, and certainly not applied tech. But I have no problem picturing something like Loroi only picking up microwave ovens from Neridi despite using microwave radars for centuries. Because they are not big on cooking, aside from Perrein cultures, whose cooking is quirky and peculiar. A jump from observation of microwave effects on water molecules to culinary applications becomes less likely. And even if it happens - a Loroi military R&D organization seems less likely to dabble in commercial consumer products like Raytheon did, and military technology information could be generally much more controlled and compartmentalized. But such applications with their eventual development can find their way back into weapons, like microwave Active Denial Systems. Maybe Loroi could reach the same things by other paths. Or maybe not. And such little things can happen with everything.
A future SPACE war conducted with SPACE motorcycles by SPACE Japanese juvenile delinquent gangs. Alas - a concept way too awesome for this sinful humanity. We'll just have to cope with Requiem and 40k.
But missing such things is not necessarily an indicator of incompetence, it could be as well an outcome of a series of circumstances and conditions. And it takes the IF of there being someone who has all the prerequisites for toppling them, aside from possibly some very niche tech. And in the period between the ascendancy of the current political makeup of the bubble and someone coming around for the toppling, a lot of things could take place - it's a period of it's own.
Gunpowder existing alongside sufficient metallurgy for producing cast bronze cannons without any cannons being made for centuries.
Yes, that's exactly how humans as a whole missed stirrups for 6.000 years.Werra wrote: ↑Sun Aug 16, 2020 9:49 pmHumans as a whole haven't missed stirrups for 6.000 years. You'd have to limit it to people that were in a position to field appreciable numbers of cavalry. Even amongst those, you'd have to cut out those whose circumstances prohibited the use of cavalry in heavy combat duties, such as nearly all Greek city states thanks to their rocky terrain or the Egyptians, thanks to their reliance on chariots or the Romans who delegated cavalry to scouting in favor of massed, heavy infantry. The rest was subject to a generally high turnover in ancient civilisations, which meant that a given people were likely only in the position to field stirruped cavalry in a way that benefitted them for maybe a century or so.
I don't think it had anything to do with human evolution, though.
Naaaaah, I'd say it's all more complicated than that, and the scientific process cannot really be separated into qualities of speed, depth, rigour, and creativity. They are all facets of the same process. And neither can theory and practice be really divorced to such a degree.Werra wrote: ↑Sun Aug 16, 2020 9:27 pmIt can. The most prominent example for that is the believe that war is good for scientific advancement. Truth is, the scientific theories are developed in peacetime. In wartime, scientific progress usually stops in favor of applying the recent scientific discoveries to practical effects.
These posts are getting fat as it is.
Well, I addressed that, didn't I:Werra wrote: ↑Sun Aug 16, 2020 9:27 pmThat the Loroi didn't have a lot of working examples of technology is hugely important, as it means they still had to puzzle together the principles behind the technology and solve all engineering challenges of material sciences and industrial manufacturing themselves.
Mk_C wrote: ↑Sun Aug 16, 2020 12:25 pmReverse-engineering advanced tech does not just give you science points. It presents you with ready solutions, often to the questions you didn't even know how to ask, that you either take - and follow a new path different from the one you would've followed on your own - or reject, losing nearly all the potential gain from the artefact. If you take it, you will eventually uncover "all the surrounding technologies, industries, material sciences and underlying principles" - but that development will be guided towards a pre-determined solution, and thus will take a different path from a development that did not involve reverse-engineering.
Flexibly adapting at the breakneck pace of one dead Azerein at a time.
You can duckduckgo how toasters work, you know. Cheeky, I know, but why do you claim obvious falsehoods?MK_C wrote:There can hardly be such a thing as a perfect or near perfect understanding of anything, much less technology.