- 122
- 31
Human civilization in Implied Spaces is transhuman civ which kinda somewhere in Forerunner tier. They have created at least 40 pocket universes which contains 40 micro-Dyson Shell along with artificial stars. Each micro-Dyson Shell's radius' is somewhere around 1,4 million km and with a volume of 12,770,103,365,136,257,983 km^3.
They could build 9 new micro-Dyson Shells under 3 weeks.
They could edit physics in their pocket universes :
"Consider what happens when we create a pocket universe of our own. We have to create a small sun that will act as if it were a large one, and on the outside of the spherical universe we have to keep the inhabitants' feet on the ground; tampering with the long-range and short-range components of Yukawa gravity accomplishes both these aims. In Midgarth, where technology is deliberately kept in the iron age, it is impossible to cause a fast enough chemical reaction to produce a successful explosion or industrial process. They are deliberately marooned in the Iron Age."Assume you were a native physicist of Midgarth, investigating the principles by which your world operates. Assuming that with the primitive methods available, you could construct the equipment to make the measurements, you'd discover that gravity varied wildly depending on the distance from the sun, and that anything halfway between the sun and the ground below was barely affected by gravity at all. If you were investigating the properties of heat, you'd discover that heat could rise up to a certain temperature, but would refuse to rise any higher.
"If you were a scientist in Midgarth, you'd find that the universe was governed by certain arbitrary conditions that barely made sense at all.
"Ah—I see a light dawning in your eyes. You know perfectly well where I'm going with this.
Ehm, okay, so, I have questions about their Attack Potency and would like help to determine their Tier. So, lets start right away....
----
AP for Using Star as Flamethrower in ground battle?
And then the world turned bright. Aristide watched in horrified awe as six, eight, a dozen pillars of fire shot up from Courtland's surface. A searing white light illuminated every soldier, every broken building, every shattered structure. The great fountains of ice crystals that towered over the wormholes gleamed and shimmered, faint rainbows shifting in their interiors.
The pillars of flame leaned and toppled, scouring Courtland's surface with plasma fire. Aristide could feel the heat through his faceplate, feel the sudden sweat prickling his face. Cooling units in his suit switched on. Terror throbbed in his heart.
Aristide watched in helpless dread as whole formations of invaders were incinerated as the white fire passed over them. They died in utter silence. Aristide looked wildly in all directions, searching for the blaze that would destroy him, but none of the eruptions seemed near enough to his position.
His legs twitched, eager to leap from the surface that could suddenly open to a world of fire.
"What is that?" he demanded.
"I'm working on that," said Bitsy.
The plasma fire rolled across the surface, each blast sweeping an arc from its point of origin. The scale of it all was so gigantic that Aristide's mind failed in its search for superlatives.
"They're opening wormholes up into suns," Bitsy said. "Or near them."
A variation, Aristide reasoned numbly, on the Venger's energy-producing pocket universe. He'd built a dozen of them and, instead of capturing the energy, simply turned it loose in a jet of superheated matter.
Using a star as a flamethrower. That was new.
The warships circling the battlefield began to respond. Carefully designed antimatter bombs were sent rocketing into the wormholes to disrupt the flow through the gates and disrupt whatever mechanism was controlling them. Some of the great fires were extinguished as their pocket universes were closed into themselves and detached from this reality, others were directed at useless angles into space.
But by then the damage had been done.
"I don't have access to the numbers that are reaching headquarters," Bitsy said, "but my best estimate is that we just lost something like eighteen million soldiers."
But the United Powers had failed to reckon with the Venger's tapping the power of whole suns that he had created just for the purpose. Not only had this weapon eliminated millions of attackers at once, but it demonstrated that the Venger's access to energy was essentially infinite.
AP for antimatter missiles?
"Courtland fired a missile," Bitsy said. "Our antiproton beams intercepted it. It was about three meters long, but at my best guess it contained about ninety million tons of antimatter. The antimatter was ejected, but fortunately it's no longer aimed at us. It's heading south of the plane of the ecliptic, and doing battle with solar wind all the way."
"Our defenses are adequate?" Tumusok asked.
"Until he fires millions of the things, yes."
They both jumped as Aristide hammered the table with both fists.
"Damn it!" he said.
The committee stared at him.
"Do you mean to say," Aristide said, "that our civilization has now reached the point where we're hurling hostile universes at each other?"
There was a moment of silence.
"Apparently yes," Bitsy said.
I calc'd that one missile would have yield of 3,5 exatons, thus High 6-A rating. And since there are millions of them at the time that can be fired, I assume with continuous bombardment it'd easily be within 5-B?
----
AP for Planet-swallowing blackhole cosmic string manipulation and retroactive existence erasure?
Brute-force calculation was what the AI platforms did best. Unable to resist making suggestions, Aristide and the others probably got in the way.
Many of the miracles Bitsy has suggested in her scenario proved unworkable. Force fields seemed impractical on the scale required. Though it proved possible to create a black hole that would swallow Courtland, Pablo, and all his works, it might also outwear its welcome and swallow other nearby objects, such as the Sun. Aristide's idea of throwing a loop of cosmic string around Courtland and hauling it into the sun, like a cowboy dragging a balky calf, was imaginative but, for complex reasons that were beyond Aristide's understanding, unfeasible.
As for
convincing the universe that Courtland and its contents had never existed, Bitsy simply replied "We'll work on that."
Courtland itself is a Planet-sized construct with mass of the Moon containing Super AI. One of eleven Super AIs orbiting the Sun.
----
AP for Big Bang?
"Consider what has to be done to create one of out celebrated pocket universes," he said. "In essence, we convince the universe that a wormhole exists and always has, and before the universe can change its mind we widen the thing with a vast amount of energy, and stabilize it with negative-mass matter that doesn't properly exist either." Jab.
"And after that miracle," jab, "we perform a few more, re-creating the Big Bang by inflating a tiny amount of matter into a whole habitable universe. Except we outdo the Big Bang," jab jab,
"because the Bang only created hydrogen and a few other light elements, so everything between helium and ununoctium has to be brought into existence in a whole secondary creation, just so that we can have something to stand on... and we can only do any of this thanks to incredible calculations on the part of the intelligences you've enslaved."
AP for ground forces?
He looked at the system's clock. Thirty seconds. Twenty. Ten. Five. One.
Antimatter reactions sent power surging to the controls of the wormhole gate, and the wormhole expanded. Suddenly there were stars overhead, and the endless flat plain of Courtland stretched all around. Half a million soldiers began moving in unison, still controlled by computer, brief spurts of their maneuvering jets taking them out of their little pocket and onto the enemy platform.
All around him, Aristide's command was taking up positions. A phalanx of twenty robots, his personal bodyguard, jetted into formation around him. They were models of deadly efficiency, flattish ovoids capable of travel by rocket or on wheels, equipped with a kind of superstructure that held close-range weapons and a battery of sensors. They looked like mantises made out of composite armor.
No engagements among Aristide's troops were reported. The battlefield seemed quiet.
Behind him, huge automated battle machines, artillery and armored vehicles, began to pour out of the wormhole.
Aristide felt his confidence increase. In the carrier he had been nothing but a helpless target. Now, free and in command, he felt he was gaining a grip on his own fate.
His unit constituted a full division, fourteen thousand fighters in all. In early industrial times, this would have been the command of a major general. As only a couple hundred of his soldiers were actual human beings, the rest being one or another sort of automaton, the military had advanced Aristide only as far as the rank of captain.
In his command of fourteen thousand were a hundred and ninety-four human beings in suits similar to his own. The rest were specialized robots. Some traveled on treads, some on wheels. Some shambled on sticklike legs, and some scurried on dozens of legs like a centipede. Some crawled, some flew. Some soared far above the battlefield to image positions over the next hill; some were built to detect mines and other underground structures.
The warriors could detect enemy in the visual spectrum, the infrared, and ultraviolet, detect them by scent, by electromagnetic emissions, by acoustic ranging. Weapons included chemical-powered slug throwers, mortars that threw antimatter bombs, rail guns, and highly intelligent rockets. Individual units were built with multiple redundancy and self-repair capability.
The humans weren't needed for the actual fighting. They were needed to tell the machines when to stop.
Aristide could observe the action from any point by uploading data from any human or robot. He watched the robots with fascination: they were deadly little devices, fearless, ruthless, highly intelligent, and unnaturally fast. Individual combats were almost too fast for Aristide to follow.
An enemy was sighted, a weapon aimed, and bang... all in less than a second. Networked battle computers meant that each saw what all the others saw—the observer need not reveal itself by movement or fire, the enemy could be destroyed by a robot over the next hill, launching smart missiles. The kills multiplied with incredible rapidity once they began.
Whole units of one side or another were turned to ash within seconds.
From ahead, bounding into the air from outside of effective detector range, came a horde of small, agile missiles. They went supersonic within seconds. The chaff filled air, and the missiles' own darting paths, made it difficult to detect them coming, but defensive machines nevertheless picked them up and began filling the air with charges of antimatter, while heavier weapons targeted the area from which the missiles had launched. Detonations filled the air overhead.
Aristide threw himself flat on the ground and told his command to do likewise.
The last-ditch defenders, automated chain cannon, began their furious roar.
The oncoming missiles didn't have single warheads, but were instead filled with tiny bomblets, knuckle-sized antimatter grenades. Even the missiles that were struck by defensive fire were very often able to scatter all or part of their cargo as they broke up over the target.
Aristide shut off his detectors before the bomblets fell, and so lay in darkness and felt the ground beneath him leap to a continuous roll of detonation. Pebbles and soil fell on his armor like rain.
The deadly drumroll came to an end, and Aristide cautiously turned on a sensor or two. A brown, dusty fog hung over the land.
"Status," he said. "Now."
"Checking," said Bitsy, and then an instant later. "We got off light. Only two hundred twenty-eight machines are failing to report. Three hundred forty have suffered some kind of damage, and sixty-four of these are disabled completely. Corporal Kuan was killed by a direct hit.
Number of drones and soldiers under one's command. Probably an individual would have one hundred drones assisting him/her at least. Drones have variety of weapons, like slug throwers, antimatter bombs, railguns and rockets. AP for them, please?
The principle threat from molecular technology was believed to be in assemblers, not disassemblers, because they could alter the immediate environment in drastic ways. No one wanted to walk on a pleasant green lawn that had converted itself to nitrocellulose.
"We're getting some larger-scale disassembler activity," Bitsy said. Maps flashed onto Aristide's display. "The disassemblers are fueling themselves by taking apart some of the railway." Aristide looked at the displays. "It's not a great threat," he said, "but I don't want that large a hot spot within our perimeter. Tell the decontamination bots to shut it down."
AP for the molecular assembers? It could change green field into nitrocellulose, so 9-B?
A titanic battle had been fought here, where formations of invaders had met formations of defenders and left nothing alive, nothing functioning. Trees, earth, and human habitations had been blasted and blackened; and tens of thousands of robot fighters and their human officers had fought here to the death. The hills were their remains; torn bodies, weapons, limbs, fragments of vehicles and spent ammunition. Little fires burned here and there. Shattered crystal glittered in the dim sun; broken antennae reached for the sky like fingers. Perhaps at the climax of the battle they had torn at each other with mechanical claws.
The husks of machines crunched beneath Aristide's mechanical feet as he climbed the slope. He hoped that there were no live human beings buried somewhere underneath.
Seen from the summit, the mechanical hills wound across the country like strands of seaweed left behind by the tide.
Standing atop the beaten, crumbling bits of metal and laminate, Aristide took a chill comfort from the fact that his own side seemed to have won this battle, and having beaten the enemy had advanced past this point.
Aftermath of the fighting. Can this be used to quantify ground forces' AP?
AP for Overpocket?
Unfortunately, I haven't found necessary quotes for Overpocket, so I will just explain it according to what I remember.
Overpocket was a titanic wormhole 6 AU in diameter, meant to swallow the inner solar system inside a pocket universe of the same size and protect it from their enemy in the Kuiper Belt.
They could build 9 new micro-Dyson Shells under 3 weeks.
They could edit physics in their pocket universes :
"Consider what happens when we create a pocket universe of our own. We have to create a small sun that will act as if it were a large one, and on the outside of the spherical universe we have to keep the inhabitants' feet on the ground; tampering with the long-range and short-range components of Yukawa gravity accomplishes both these aims. In Midgarth, where technology is deliberately kept in the iron age, it is impossible to cause a fast enough chemical reaction to produce a successful explosion or industrial process. They are deliberately marooned in the Iron Age."Assume you were a native physicist of Midgarth, investigating the principles by which your world operates. Assuming that with the primitive methods available, you could construct the equipment to make the measurements, you'd discover that gravity varied wildly depending on the distance from the sun, and that anything halfway between the sun and the ground below was barely affected by gravity at all. If you were investigating the properties of heat, you'd discover that heat could rise up to a certain temperature, but would refuse to rise any higher.
"If you were a scientist in Midgarth, you'd find that the universe was governed by certain arbitrary conditions that barely made sense at all.
"Ah—I see a light dawning in your eyes. You know perfectly well where I'm going with this.
Ehm, okay, so, I have questions about their Attack Potency and would like help to determine their Tier. So, lets start right away....
----
AP for Using Star as Flamethrower in ground battle?
And then the world turned bright. Aristide watched in horrified awe as six, eight, a dozen pillars of fire shot up from Courtland's surface. A searing white light illuminated every soldier, every broken building, every shattered structure. The great fountains of ice crystals that towered over the wormholes gleamed and shimmered, faint rainbows shifting in their interiors.
The pillars of flame leaned and toppled, scouring Courtland's surface with plasma fire. Aristide could feel the heat through his faceplate, feel the sudden sweat prickling his face. Cooling units in his suit switched on. Terror throbbed in his heart.
Aristide watched in helpless dread as whole formations of invaders were incinerated as the white fire passed over them. They died in utter silence. Aristide looked wildly in all directions, searching for the blaze that would destroy him, but none of the eruptions seemed near enough to his position.
His legs twitched, eager to leap from the surface that could suddenly open to a world of fire.
"What is that?" he demanded.
"I'm working on that," said Bitsy.
The plasma fire rolled across the surface, each blast sweeping an arc from its point of origin. The scale of it all was so gigantic that Aristide's mind failed in its search for superlatives.
"They're opening wormholes up into suns," Bitsy said. "Or near them."
A variation, Aristide reasoned numbly, on the Venger's energy-producing pocket universe. He'd built a dozen of them and, instead of capturing the energy, simply turned it loose in a jet of superheated matter.
Using a star as a flamethrower. That was new.
The warships circling the battlefield began to respond. Carefully designed antimatter bombs were sent rocketing into the wormholes to disrupt the flow through the gates and disrupt whatever mechanism was controlling them. Some of the great fires were extinguished as their pocket universes were closed into themselves and detached from this reality, others were directed at useless angles into space.
But by then the damage had been done.
"I don't have access to the numbers that are reaching headquarters," Bitsy said, "but my best estimate is that we just lost something like eighteen million soldiers."
But the United Powers had failed to reckon with the Venger's tapping the power of whole suns that he had created just for the purpose. Not only had this weapon eliminated millions of attackers at once, but it demonstrated that the Venger's access to energy was essentially infinite.
AP for antimatter missiles?
"Courtland fired a missile," Bitsy said. "Our antiproton beams intercepted it. It was about three meters long, but at my best guess it contained about ninety million tons of antimatter. The antimatter was ejected, but fortunately it's no longer aimed at us. It's heading south of the plane of the ecliptic, and doing battle with solar wind all the way."
"Our defenses are adequate?" Tumusok asked.
"Until he fires millions of the things, yes."
They both jumped as Aristide hammered the table with both fists.
"Damn it!" he said.
The committee stared at him.
"Do you mean to say," Aristide said, "that our civilization has now reached the point where we're hurling hostile universes at each other?"
There was a moment of silence.
"Apparently yes," Bitsy said.
I calc'd that one missile would have yield of 3,5 exatons, thus High 6-A rating. And since there are millions of them at the time that can be fired, I assume with continuous bombardment it'd easily be within 5-B?
----
AP for Planet-swallowing blackhole cosmic string manipulation and retroactive existence erasure?
Brute-force calculation was what the AI platforms did best. Unable to resist making suggestions, Aristide and the others probably got in the way.
Many of the miracles Bitsy has suggested in her scenario proved unworkable. Force fields seemed impractical on the scale required. Though it proved possible to create a black hole that would swallow Courtland, Pablo, and all his works, it might also outwear its welcome and swallow other nearby objects, such as the Sun. Aristide's idea of throwing a loop of cosmic string around Courtland and hauling it into the sun, like a cowboy dragging a balky calf, was imaginative but, for complex reasons that were beyond Aristide's understanding, unfeasible.
As for
convincing the universe that Courtland and its contents had never existed, Bitsy simply replied "We'll work on that."
Courtland itself is a Planet-sized construct with mass of the Moon containing Super AI. One of eleven Super AIs orbiting the Sun.
----
AP for Big Bang?
"Consider what has to be done to create one of out celebrated pocket universes," he said. "In essence, we convince the universe that a wormhole exists and always has, and before the universe can change its mind we widen the thing with a vast amount of energy, and stabilize it with negative-mass matter that doesn't properly exist either." Jab.
"And after that miracle," jab, "we perform a few more, re-creating the Big Bang by inflating a tiny amount of matter into a whole habitable universe. Except we outdo the Big Bang," jab jab,
"because the Bang only created hydrogen and a few other light elements, so everything between helium and ununoctium has to be brought into existence in a whole secondary creation, just so that we can have something to stand on... and we can only do any of this thanks to incredible calculations on the part of the intelligences you've enslaved."
AP for ground forces?
He looked at the system's clock. Thirty seconds. Twenty. Ten. Five. One.
Antimatter reactions sent power surging to the controls of the wormhole gate, and the wormhole expanded. Suddenly there were stars overhead, and the endless flat plain of Courtland stretched all around. Half a million soldiers began moving in unison, still controlled by computer, brief spurts of their maneuvering jets taking them out of their little pocket and onto the enemy platform.
All around him, Aristide's command was taking up positions. A phalanx of twenty robots, his personal bodyguard, jetted into formation around him. They were models of deadly efficiency, flattish ovoids capable of travel by rocket or on wheels, equipped with a kind of superstructure that held close-range weapons and a battery of sensors. They looked like mantises made out of composite armor.
No engagements among Aristide's troops were reported. The battlefield seemed quiet.
Behind him, huge automated battle machines, artillery and armored vehicles, began to pour out of the wormhole.
Aristide felt his confidence increase. In the carrier he had been nothing but a helpless target. Now, free and in command, he felt he was gaining a grip on his own fate.
His unit constituted a full division, fourteen thousand fighters in all. In early industrial times, this would have been the command of a major general. As only a couple hundred of his soldiers were actual human beings, the rest being one or another sort of automaton, the military had advanced Aristide only as far as the rank of captain.
In his command of fourteen thousand were a hundred and ninety-four human beings in suits similar to his own. The rest were specialized robots. Some traveled on treads, some on wheels. Some shambled on sticklike legs, and some scurried on dozens of legs like a centipede. Some crawled, some flew. Some soared far above the battlefield to image positions over the next hill; some were built to detect mines and other underground structures.
The warriors could detect enemy in the visual spectrum, the infrared, and ultraviolet, detect them by scent, by electromagnetic emissions, by acoustic ranging. Weapons included chemical-powered slug throwers, mortars that threw antimatter bombs, rail guns, and highly intelligent rockets. Individual units were built with multiple redundancy and self-repair capability.
The humans weren't needed for the actual fighting. They were needed to tell the machines when to stop.
Aristide could observe the action from any point by uploading data from any human or robot. He watched the robots with fascination: they were deadly little devices, fearless, ruthless, highly intelligent, and unnaturally fast. Individual combats were almost too fast for Aristide to follow.
An enemy was sighted, a weapon aimed, and bang... all in less than a second. Networked battle computers meant that each saw what all the others saw—the observer need not reveal itself by movement or fire, the enemy could be destroyed by a robot over the next hill, launching smart missiles. The kills multiplied with incredible rapidity once they began.
Whole units of one side or another were turned to ash within seconds.
From ahead, bounding into the air from outside of effective detector range, came a horde of small, agile missiles. They went supersonic within seconds. The chaff filled air, and the missiles' own darting paths, made it difficult to detect them coming, but defensive machines nevertheless picked them up and began filling the air with charges of antimatter, while heavier weapons targeted the area from which the missiles had launched. Detonations filled the air overhead.
Aristide threw himself flat on the ground and told his command to do likewise.
The last-ditch defenders, automated chain cannon, began their furious roar.
The oncoming missiles didn't have single warheads, but were instead filled with tiny bomblets, knuckle-sized antimatter grenades. Even the missiles that were struck by defensive fire were very often able to scatter all or part of their cargo as they broke up over the target.
Aristide shut off his detectors before the bomblets fell, and so lay in darkness and felt the ground beneath him leap to a continuous roll of detonation. Pebbles and soil fell on his armor like rain.
The deadly drumroll came to an end, and Aristide cautiously turned on a sensor or two. A brown, dusty fog hung over the land.
"Status," he said. "Now."
"Checking," said Bitsy, and then an instant later. "We got off light. Only two hundred twenty-eight machines are failing to report. Three hundred forty have suffered some kind of damage, and sixty-four of these are disabled completely. Corporal Kuan was killed by a direct hit.
Number of drones and soldiers under one's command. Probably an individual would have one hundred drones assisting him/her at least. Drones have variety of weapons, like slug throwers, antimatter bombs, railguns and rockets. AP for them, please?
The principle threat from molecular technology was believed to be in assemblers, not disassemblers, because they could alter the immediate environment in drastic ways. No one wanted to walk on a pleasant green lawn that had converted itself to nitrocellulose.
"We're getting some larger-scale disassembler activity," Bitsy said. Maps flashed onto Aristide's display. "The disassemblers are fueling themselves by taking apart some of the railway." Aristide looked at the displays. "It's not a great threat," he said, "but I don't want that large a hot spot within our perimeter. Tell the decontamination bots to shut it down."
AP for the molecular assembers? It could change green field into nitrocellulose, so 9-B?
A titanic battle had been fought here, where formations of invaders had met formations of defenders and left nothing alive, nothing functioning. Trees, earth, and human habitations had been blasted and blackened; and tens of thousands of robot fighters and their human officers had fought here to the death. The hills were their remains; torn bodies, weapons, limbs, fragments of vehicles and spent ammunition. Little fires burned here and there. Shattered crystal glittered in the dim sun; broken antennae reached for the sky like fingers. Perhaps at the climax of the battle they had torn at each other with mechanical claws.
The husks of machines crunched beneath Aristide's mechanical feet as he climbed the slope. He hoped that there were no live human beings buried somewhere underneath.
Seen from the summit, the mechanical hills wound across the country like strands of seaweed left behind by the tide.
Standing atop the beaten, crumbling bits of metal and laminate, Aristide took a chill comfort from the fact that his own side seemed to have won this battle, and having beaten the enemy had advanced past this point.
Aftermath of the fighting. Can this be used to quantify ground forces' AP?
AP for Overpocket?
Unfortunately, I haven't found necessary quotes for Overpocket, so I will just explain it according to what I remember.
Overpocket was a titanic wormhole 6 AU in diameter, meant to swallow the inner solar system inside a pocket universe of the same size and protect it from their enemy in the Kuiper Belt.
