The Culture v's 40kverse

[Gavinfoxx]

Nah, it's not so much whether the Culture know they have a Shard or not. They'll just assume every dynasty has one and just stay the hell away from Necron worlds unless they're whacking it with maximum force.

Also, losing a ship depends strongly on the range of the Shard's reality warping powers. GSVs are 200 km long, which might take more than "a few miles around here" range to do in. I'm not sure how big GCUs are, but they probably don't fit into a few miles sphere.

I think the size of GCU is mentioned in the novel you just read -- the Player of Games one, as well as maximum sprint speed (something like 1200c?). I think it was under 10 km... I could be wrong...

Oooh, lookie here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_types_of_the_Culture

[jseah]

We might be miscommunicating here. This is what happens after they lose a ship, not before.

---------------------------

Wasn't that a 700 year old ROU? And the Limiting Factor was quoted to be able to reach Ea from outside the Azad empire within a few hours, at maximum speed.

The Wiki article doesn't say sizes apart from the 200 km System class GSV and the 53 km Plate class GSV.

[Gavinfoxx]

Wasn't that a 700 year old ROU? And the Limiting Factor was quoted to be able to reach Ea from outside the Azad empire within a few hours, at maximum speed.

Uhh... it could have been... I wasn't taking notes... and I was overtired at the time....

[jseah]

FYI, it's ~7000 c to travel 4 light years in 5 hours. Which implies that to reach Ea from outside the Empire of Azad's space (which consists of multiple stars), the ROU must be traveling many times that. Probably closer to a 100 kilolights.

Then again, it's an ROU, which makes things a bit more tricky since those are built to be fast.

[Gavinfoxx]

So is this a case of the author not doing the math?

[The Glyphstone]

Nah, it's not so much whether the Culture know they have a Shard or not. They'll just assume every dynasty has one and just stay the hell away from Necron worlds unless they're whacking it with maximum force.
EDIT: we might be miscommunicating here. This is what happens after they lose a ship, not before.

Also, losing a ship depends strongly on the range of the Shard's reality warping powers. GSVs are 200 km long, which might take more than "a few miles around here" range to do in. I'm not sure how big GCUs are, but they probably don't fit into a few miles sphere.

My point was more that the Culture wouldn't even know Shards exist, so they couldn't anticipate the tome having one.

So is this a case of the author not doing the math?

Le Gasp.

[Tavar]

After a Shard is used, though, they would know they exist.

[Forum Explorer]

Sure but this Tomb shouldn't have a shard.


Also new thread? Jseah do you want to make it?

[Fan]

I'm more scared of what happens when the Necrons realize that there's a bigger fish currently in the pond than any of their dynasties, and what this would mean for them unifying.

Though the same could be said of the IOM, greater adversity is the ultimate unification device after all.

*Edit.

It's also canon that the reason for the Blackstone Fortresses creation was to try to kill the Void Dragon. It didn't work, all of them (3 being able to cause a star to go Nova, going by the given scale, the next is probably a solar system, and all together likely a large number of them.) together could not kill the Void Dragon.

That says something.

[Gavinfoxx]

I guess I will have to make a new version of that Text with 'The Story So Far'...

So you could put it in the starting few posts, right?

[The Glyphstone]

Sure but this Tomb shouldn't have a shard.


Also new thread? Jseah do you want to make it?

That's a given. We're mostly discussing a hypothetical right now.

We need a new thread title as well.


Culture Vs. 40K II: Now With 100% more Fanfiction

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I think the size of GCU is mentioned in the novel you just read -- the Player of Games one, as well as maximum sprint speed (something like 1200c?).

Which implies that to reach Ea from outside the Empire of Azad's space (which consists of multiple stars), the ROU must be traveling many times that. Probably closer to a 100 kilolights.

So is this a case of the author not doing the math?

No, Banks did the math, it's your recollection of 1,200 c that's off; Culture ships measure their speeds in multiple kilolights (1000 c), so 1.2 Kc is way too low. Killer-class ROUs built near the beginning of the Idiran-Culture war have a cruising speed of ~87 Kc, while it's established in Excession that modern ROUs have a cruising speed of 144 Kc and a sprint speed of 221 Kc, with standard GSVs having a cruising speed around 128 Kc. A top speed of 100 Kc for a ROU built near the end of the Idiran-Culture war like the Limiting Factor sounds about right.

[Gavinfoxx]

Also! A thing I forgot to add -- if they DO scan the bodies of one of the Primarchs, they should totally see something like, 'hunh, there is some really good ideas for biological transhuman augmentations. Some really clever stuff and engineering that we never thought of. Wow, we found some stuff that we could maybe take as inspiration to add to the Culture Standard genofixing; I can't believe we never thought of this stuff!'

Re: speed

I think I remember 120 or 12 or 1200 of the unit, though...

[The Glyphstone]

Also! A thing I forgot to add -- if they DO scan the bodies of one of the Primarchs, they should totally see something like, 'hunh, there is some really good ideas for biological transhuman augmentations. Some really clever stuff and engineering that we never thought of. Wow, we found some stuff that we could maybe take as inspiration to add to the Culture Standard genofixing; I can't believe we never thought of this stuff!'

Re: speed

I think I remember 120 or 12 or 1200 of the unit, though...

That requires getting a Primarch's body, though, which means either raiding Ultramar for Girlyman, or hunting down a Chaos Demon Primarch.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Re: speed

I think I remember 120 or 12 or 1200 of the unit, though...

GSUs have a cruising speed of ~128 Kc, so that might be what you're thinking of. I don't have either Player of Games or Excession at hand to check exact quotes, unfortunately.

[Gavinfoxx]

That requires getting a Primarch's body, though, which means either raiding Ultramar for Girlyman, or hunting down a Chaos Demon Primarch.

No, it means going to Ultramar and scanning him once they have an understanding of Stasis Fields, right?

[jseah]

continued

Spoiler

Show

After much discussion, we decided to hold a full vote of all citizens and that gave the expected result to return the artifacts. It might be called tyranny of the majority, but we believe that friendly relations might still be possible despite our intrusion.

We did return the artifacts by Displacer, but not before scanning them as thoroughly as possible.

Negotiations with the Necron Lord and watching of the spacecraft and orbital defenses has led us to believe that the Necrons operate their entire society on a military paradigm quite similar to how the IoM's military operate. While tactically, the Necrons are more flexible, their strategic evolution and time frame are within the same order of magnitude.

This is of great interest as we have never met a society that could operate completely under a military framework, with no civilian or unmobilized population. We have also observed activites in unshielded areas and have come to the conclusion that the Necrons also do not operate a classical pre-singularity economy either as their basic citizens, the Necron warriors, do not appear sentient.

They may, indeed, be on the cusp of a singularity, if they are in the process of optimizing an automated system to run the whole society and the Necron warrior is the basic unsentient prototype of this technology.

We have decided not to inform the Necron Lord of our capture of the Necron warriors. He claims no knowledge of the raid and in fact, no knowledge of the IoM, which implies that this world has lain dormant or never explored outside this system for nearly all of the IoM's history.

Week 3
GSV So Much For Subtlety has joined us at our position as we had requested earlier. The Necron Lord inquired as to our movements as he apparently detected the mass signature of the System class GSV.

We assured him that we were not intending any hostile action and backed away another three light years, which appeared to satisfy him. The Necrons appear to be able to see into hyperspace, which indicate they have hyperspace technology and may be able to explain the reported ability of the Necrons to avoid hostile fire by moving slightly in 4 dimensions.
Indeed, a close scan of hyperspace around the Necron world revealed folds and clear signs of artificial engineering of spatial shape.

Negotiations are difficult and the Necron Lord suddenly demanded compensation for the damage we did to the world completely out of the blue, which was confusing as he did not specify what the terms were. An offer to help him reconstruct was rejected and we eventually opted to send a gift of a thousand tons of refined metal sorted into a ratio that was the best match for their metallic construction material.

This appeared to mollify the Necron Lord and he continued negotiations. This behaviour was slightly unexpected and no amount of analysis indicated anything we said that might have offended him.

The Necron don't appear to understand the meaning of culture. In our experience, this has always been because of a devastating event in the race's past, but the Necron Lord has so far refused to communicate any information about the Necrons and has demonstrated occasional bouts of irrationality and unpredictable behaviour.

Eventually, negotiations reached a point where we had to press our request, quite forcefully, that we wished an exchange of our civilizations' history and only after mentioning our hypothesis that the Necrons were a HS made by another civilization like us did he actually explain Necron history outright without even agreeing to the exchange.
We shared our history and explanation of our society's values despite technically not being required to, it was within the spirit of the negotiation.


The Necron story is older than the Eldars'. It explains much, including the formation of HSes in a war, which the Necrons... more accurately called Necrontyr, most definitely aren't an engineered HS. While the Orks are implied to be one. (reports from GCU Clap Your Hands seem to corroborate this)

C'Tans appear to be a massive threat inimical to organic life. The Necron description of their capabilities was worrying and no explanation of what happened to them after the Necron revolt (which was sparse in details) was given.
All Culture ships are to be on the look out for Ascended being activity, there might another player besides Chaos lurking around. In extremis, Ascension ourselves might have to be considered.

I realize the name So Much For Subtlety has been used in Player of Games, but it was just too good to pass up. Besides, I thought of it before I read PoG, so it's all good. Right?


Boy, are the Eldar going to be pissed. And this Necron ain't too happy either, what with the Culture more or less hinting that they suspect him of being a killing machine made by the C'Tan. (which clearly had to put right)

Great... the Culture have managed to royally piss off both million year old civilizations (the Necrons know the Culture have been in contact with the Eldar since they know the Culture is a recent arrival and the Culture can speak Eldar...)

And while the Culture positively love to meddle, patching this particular million-year-old spat might just be a bit too much for them. Doesn't help that neither Necrons or Eldar change at all quickly.
Me thinks the hatred probably runs deep enough that even at gunpoint, the Eldar and Necrons can't be made to work together.

How are the Necrons likely to react to the Culture's explanation of their society?

And lol @ the Necrons having to talk in Eldar, that must surely grate on his thought circuits.
I wrote a bit and then realized that the Culture doesn't speak Necron and the Necrons don't speak Marain. That was a >.> moment.


Also, a question about the null field thing. 3 to 5 monoliths were said to be able to generate a field of no-warp connection. Presumably the field is impregnable to daemons?
(yes, thinking ahead here)

[deuterio12]

So now daemonic beings follow the laws of biology? Thats a new one if I ever heard it.

Also gotta love how the original necron fluff and the wardcron fluff is being mixed as convenient.

Also! A thing I forgot to add -- if they DO scan the bodies of one of the Primarchs, they should totally see something like, 'hunh, there is some really good ideas for biological transhuman augmentations. Some really clever stuff and engineering that we never thought of. Wow, we found some stuff that we could maybe take as inspiration to add to the Culture Standard genofixing; I can't believe we never thought of this stuff!'

It's actually quite simple to believe the culture never tought of that stuff, because primarchs are only "human" in a quite stretchy use of the word. They look humanoid sure, but they were grown in labs from the start, probably with psykery involved, subject to chaos corruption when spread trough the galaxy (sanguinus had wings and great flight maneuverability whitout a tail for stablization, aka magic involved), and none of them had any registed natural children.

EDIT:

The Necrons beat the C'tan at the star god's weakest, with technology that's probably closer to Culturetech than they have now, and it cost them most of their civilization to do it.

It cost them less than 1% of their civilization to do it actually. The revolt against the c'tan resulted in millions of wardcron casualities. Then during their idiotic sleep they take billions of losses. The numbers are right from Ward himself.

[Forum Explorer]

continued

Spoiler

Show

After much discussion, we decided to hold a full vote of all citizens and that gave the expected result to return the artifacts. It might be called tyranny of the majority, but we believe that friendly relations might still be possible despite our intrusion.

We did return the artifacts by Displacer, but not before scanning them as thoroughly as possible.

Negotiations with the Necron Lord and watching of the spacecraft and orbital defenses has led us to believe that the Necrons operate their entire society on a military paradigm quite similar to how the IoM's military operate. While tactically, the Necrons are more flexible, their strategic evolution and time frame are within the same order of magnitude.

This is of great interest as we have never met a society that could operate completely under a military framework, with no civilian or unmobilized population. We have also observed activites in unshielded areas and have come to the conclusion that the Necrons also do not operate a classical pre-singularity economy either as their basic citizens, the Necron warriors, do not appear sentient.

They may, indeed, be on the cusp of a singularity, if they are in the process of optimizing an automated system to run the whole society and the Necron warrior is the basic unsentient prototype of this technology.

We have decided not to inform the Necron Lord of our capture of the Necron warriors. He claims no knowledge of the raid and in fact, no knowledge of the IoM, which implies that this world has lain dormant or never explored outside this system for nearly all of the IoM's history.

Week 3
GSV So Much For Subtlety has joined us at our position as we had requested earlier. The Necron Lord inquired as to our movements as he apparently detected the mass signature of the System class GSV.

We assured him that we were not intending any hostile action and backed away another three light years, which appeared to satisfy him. The Necrons appear to be able to see into hyperspace, which indicate they have hyperspace technology and may be able to explain the reported ability of the Necrons to avoid hostile fire by moving slightly in 4 dimensions.
Indeed, a close scan of hyperspace around the Necron world revealed folds and clear signs of artificial engineering of spatial shape.

Negotiations are difficult and the Necron Lord suddenly demanded compensation for the damage we did to the world completely out of the blue, which was confusing as he did not specify what the terms were. An offer to help him reconstruct was rejected and we eventually opted to send a gift of a thousand tons of refined metal sorted into a ratio that was the best match for their metallic construction material.

This appeared to mollify the Necron Lord and he continued negotiations. This behaviour was slightly unexpected and no amount of analysis indicated anything we said that might have offended him.

The Necron don't appear to understand the meaning of culture. In our experience, this has always been because of a devastating event in the race's past, but the Necron Lord has so far refused to communicate any information about the Necrons and has demonstrated occasional bouts of irrationality and unpredictable behaviour.

Eventually, negotiations reached a point where we had to press our request, quite forcefully, that we wished an exchange of our civilizations' history and only after mentioning our hypothesis that the Necrons were a HS made by another civilization like us did he actually explain Necron history outright without even agreeing to the exchange.
We shared our history and explanation of our society's values despite technically not being required to, it was within the spirit of the negotiation.


The Necron story is older than the Eldars'. It explains much, including the formation of HSes in a war, which the Necrons... more accurately called Necrontyr, most definitely aren't an engineered HS. While the Orks are implied to be one. (reports from GCU Clap Your Hands seem to corroborate this)

C'Tans appear to be a massive threat inimical to organic life. The Necron description of their capabilities was worrying and no explanation of what happened to them after the Necron revolt (which was sparse in details) was given.
All Culture ships are to be on the look out for Ascended being activity, there might another player besides Chaos lurking around. In extremis, Ascension ourselves might have to be considered.

I realize the name So Much For Subtlety has been used in Player of Games, but it was just too good to pass up. Besides, I thought of it before I read PoG, so it's all good. Right?


Boy, are the Eldar going to be pissed. And this Necron ain't too happy either, what with the Culture more or less hinting that they suspect him of being a killing machine made by the C'Tan. (which clearly had to put right)

Great... the Culture have managed to royally piss off both million year old civilizations (the Necrons know the Culture have been in contact with the Eldar since they know the Culture is a recent arrival and the Culture can speak Eldar...)

And while the Culture positively love to meddle, patching this particular million-year-old spat might just be a bit too much for them. Doesn't help that neither Necrons or Eldar change at all quickly.
Me thinks the hatred probably runs deep enough that even at gunpoint, the Eldar and Necrons can't be made to work together.

How are the Necrons likely to react to the Culture's explanation of their society?

And lol @ the Necrons having to talk in Eldar, that must surely grate on his thought circuits.
I wrote a bit and then realized that the Culture doesn't speak Necron and the Necrons don't speak Marain. That was a >.> moment.


Also, a question about the null field thing. 3 to 5 monoliths were said to be able to generate a field of no-warp connection. Presumably the field is impregnable to daemons?
(yes, thinking ahead here)

To be exact both 60 million year old races are now upset at the Culture. Both are also the only ones who possess tech that even comes close to the Culture. (In the past the Eldar moved stars around and were fulling capable of collapsing them. They tend to consider such weapons as 'forbidden' though)

However Eldar are reasonable enough to not pick a fight though. They know they can't afford such a conflict. They might decide to test the Culture/Necron relationship though by tricking Orks or the Imperium into attacking the Necrons right now.

Yeah I don't think they could fix this. I don't see how they could fix this except by forcing the Eldar and Necrons to simply keep their distance from each other. Even then both sides would try and figure out a way to kill each other.

For the null field it wouldn't instantly negate the deamons. It would significantly weaken them however and make it possible to destroy them as their F-U physics powers are negated inside the field.

[The Glyphstone]

So now daemonic beings follow the laws of biology? Thats a new one if I ever heard it.

Also gotta love how the original necron fluff and the wardcron fluff is being mixed as convenient.

And how would you suggest we blend bland fluff and lame fluff into something tolerable and tasty?

It cost them less than 1% of their civilization to do it actually. The revolt against the c'tan resulted in millions of wardcron casualities. Then during their idiotic sleep they take billions of losses. The numbers are right from Ward himself.

Check your sources. The exact quote you're mis-quoting is "millions, if not billions" were lost to stasis, and 'millions' were killed in the revolt. Unless you can prove that millions > millions, all you've accomplished is reminding us once again that Matt Ward is an idiot


EDIt: A Null field can shut out weaker demons entirely, since they're the ones with the most tenuous hold on the real world to begin with.

[jseah]

'hunh, there is some really good ideas for biological transhuman augmentations. Some really clever stuff and engineering that we never thought of. Wow, we found some stuff that we could maybe take as inspiration to add to the Culture Standard genofixing; I can't believe we never thought of this stuff!'

Actually, this bit bothers me about his works. I mean, the Culture has all this control over biology (it's basically miracle working here) and everyone's an almost-standard human?

Seriously?

If you go by what we would do if we could design our own bodies, there'll be a hell of alot of wings. Both feather and butterfly style ones, although probably ornamental. Gods, can you imagine how overworked the service bots would be cleaning up the feathers.
EDIT: Hell, if I could do that, even I would go for a pair of white feather wings for a couple of years.

And some mermaids. And pre-puberty body plans (it also works better with wings if you want to actually fly so there's that too).

I can also see some people going for tentacles, or turn into a distributed intelligence of a hive... =/

[Gavinfoxx]

Actually, this bit bothers me about his works. I mean, the Culture has all this control over biology (it's basically miracle working here) and everyone's an almost-standard human?

Seriously?

Well, the books did come from an era in sci fi when lots of major transhuman augmentations weren't part of the genre or really a thing... some people did try and think about what would be good designs for aliens though. So I would just give it a 'pass'... Regardless, the existence of groups of people really exalting in changing their form (the Mechanicum, including the Genetors/Adeptus Biologis/Organicists who use lots of biological changes..) Also the Astartes, and some of the minor xenos races do lots of bioengineering.

Jseah, I'm working on a compilation of all of the parts of the story, sans all but the minimal necessary OOC description. When I have it caught up, I will PM it to you (at least a Mediafire link), for purposes of the start of the new thread.

[Gavinfoxx]

Also, have you decided how or what will be done to get the Rogue Trader access to a bunch of IoM-Standard blueprints (both recreations of STC and non, ie, more 'recent's stuff?)? Have you decided what will be in there? Based on what is or isn't in there, there could be some issues... I'll PM you some ideas on that, maybe.

Also, there are some threads still hanging for Part 6, like seeing how the IoM fights Chaos (including recovering from a Chaos incursion), or other Rogue Trader stuff... as well as the ships going near the Eye of Terror...

[Forum Explorer]

Also, have you decided how or what will be done to get the Rogue Trader access to a bunch of IoM-Standard blueprints (both recreations of STC and non, ie, more 'recent's stuff?)? Have you decided what will be in there? Based on what is or isn't in there, there could be some issues... I'll PM you some ideas on that, maybe.

Also, there are some threads still hanging for Part 6, like seeing how the IoM fights Chaos (including recovering from a Chaos incursion), or other Rogue Trader stuff... as well as the ships going near the Eye of Terror...

new thread. You should move this post over there.