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Machine Spirit (PA/Multicross SI)

Discussion in 'Creative Writing' started by Lazurman, Feb 28, 2016.

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  1. Lazurman

    Lazurman That Others May Fap

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    ...waitaminute!

    Datsapun!
     
    Desdiv_Eight likes this.
  2. theqwopingone

    theqwopingone Journeyman rationalist wannabe. Gone for Good

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    hang on,if you don't have a soul then you should have been able to just destroy the parts of you that had the 'scars' from running the scrap code and made new parts to replace them with with no carry over,and if you do have a soul...well you need to get that thing the hell out of the warp.

    i wonder if you can make enough spirit stones/a big enough spirit stone to eat a warp god,and now i know how to exterminatus a daemon world.
     
    Last edited: Apr 13, 2016
  3. Lazurman

    Lazurman That Others May Fap

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    Spoiler alert: THE AUTHOR CHANGED HIS MIND! WE GOT A SOUL UP IN THIS BITCH!
     
    EternitynChaos and .IronSun. like this.
  4. theqwopingone

    theqwopingone Journeyman rationalist wannabe. Gone for Good

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    if this doesn't end with you putting the Eye Of Terror in a dyson sphere i will be sad,preferably with enought Golden Planets orbiting it that you can put towers on them and use them as gear teeth.
     
  5. Lazurman

    Lazurman That Others May Fap

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    Okay, confession time, guys. I'm stuck. I don't know what to write next. The problem with having a protagonist that effectively exists in many different places at once means I could write...a whole lot of things. And I don't know what to do first! So, I'll leave the choice in you guys' hands. What do you want me to write about?

    -The upcoming space battle?
    -New units vs a Bloodthirster?
    -A snip from Commander Cook as he fights alongside his unlikely allies?
    -My efforts in overseeing the evacuation of the human populace?
    -A meeting with a sneaky-beaky Ordo Malleus Inquisitor?

    Let me know. Suggestions help.
     
  6. theqwopingone

    theqwopingone Journeyman rationalist wannabe. Gone for Good

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    your R&D fork gets the idea to start sending in the bastard off spring of a Bainling a xenomorph and that rolling droid thing from starwars,gives them wing blades that make the queen of blades look cute,and tells them to kill as many deamons as it can and then give them a hug and blow them back to hell,and we get to see it from the first person.

    on another note,if you want some inspiration for unit design you should look up 'gia anime',it should give you some good ideas.
     
    Last edited: Apr 18, 2016
  7. theImmortalGuardian

    theImmortalGuardian Versed in the lewd.

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    I would like to see a continuation of the space battle and how your clunky space-starfish does against Chaos ships. After that just write what comes naturally based on the character. Where would the Commander's priorities lie? Does he feel the need to micro all his units all the time and let the evacuation commence in the background? Does he try to focus on the evacuation until a Bloodthirster starts wrecking his units? Or does he throw more men at the problem until it goes away while trying to create something new? Maybe he tries to juggle everything, and invariable misses something important (which would be a pleasant surprise).
     
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  8. Wootius

    Wootius I trust you know where the happy button is?

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    Spacebattles first. Hue.

    Do some hints that the ground battle is starting to take to more and more of your resources. When the space battle is well in hand, switch to Cook's view for a bit as he gets overwhelmed. Bloodthirster looms over him, suddenly large metal fist followed up by plasma bolts.

    Cue switch back to commander.
     
    Last edited: Apr 16, 2016
    Justbrowsing, Blargh and Lazurman like this.
  9. theqwopingone

    theqwopingone Journeyman rationalist wannabe. Gone for Good

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    OR,or we could see this from the cultists/deamons point of view.
     
    Mandabar likes this.
  10. theonebutcher

    theonebutcher Hahaha! ... Waitaminute... Oh God NO!

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    Why tell anyone you're an AI?

    "This is Supreme Commander Jaghetai Kahn interred in the Primarch Class Planetary Annihilator Dreadnought Emperors Will."

    Fifty Doxes crest the Hill.

    "The Emperor has heard your prayers and while he distracts Khorne with an extended game of "Lets see how many arms you can regrow in one day." I will scour this planet of the lesser annoyances. Please keep my orbital shipyards covered, I might need an hour or two to properly show the heretics what happens when the Emperor himself gets into a tinkering mood."

    "What do you mean you don't believe me? Are you telling me that anyone but the Emperor himself could design a Dreadnought that can conquer a whole solar system by itself?"
     
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  11. Lazurman

    Lazurman That Others May Fap

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    See, that might just work. Maybe. Possibly. If I put on my best acting face. Only problem is that I don't like lying. I will never lie in this story. Half-truths, at most. But no Blatant Lies.
     
  12. theqwopingone

    theqwopingone Journeyman rationalist wannabe. Gone for Good

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    i don't think any of those lines were lies, i'm sure that if the Emperor "gets into a tinkering mood." for long enough (seeing as he's a immortal) what he makes would look something like what you're going to show them.

    and it's not like he would ever turn down someone willing and able to fight as a brother in arms, so who cares what the rest of imperium thinks?
     
  13. theonebutcher

    theonebutcher Hahaha! ... Waitaminute... Oh God NO!

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    A fan of true from a certain point of view? There's a name for things which are true from a certain point of view: Lies.

    But, you were a human, now you're interred in a machine: You are a Dreadnought.

    It's from Planetary Annihilation, you're Planetary Annihilation class.

    Ect. You don't have to pretend you're a Primarch though, that was just to put you on top of the Command Chain and make you not beholden to their stupid orders.
     
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  14. NavigatorNobilis

    NavigatorNobilis Follower of the Second Star

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    And draw hilarious amounts of attention from every faction in the Imperium, especially the surgically altered and genetically engineered legions of supersoldiers who are authorised to go wherever the fuck they please and as such would show up before long. Not to mention the problems which would inevitably occur when he was proven false - which he would, given that he's at the very least not protected from psychic divinations, nevermind less outlandish possibilities like being requested to meet others in person.
     
    Least Devotee likes this.
  15. theonebutcher

    theonebutcher Hahaha! ... Waitaminute... Oh God NO!

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    I don't know much about psychic bullcrap, but why can't he meet people in person? He would pretend to be a dreadnought, a crippled Space Marine interred in a war machine, it's not like anyone can cut him up to check if there's a meat brain in there.

    Unless the psychic stuff can do that, I didn't consider psychic bullcrap.
     
  16. Jarudazuigu

    Jarudazuigu Sealed, for now

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    Psyker bullcrap would find he has a human soul.
    He can say he's "Planetary Annihilator" Titan-Class Dreadnought. Recently awoken.
    Be helpful and respectful of Emprah and that should give you points.

    Nicely explain that you'll shot in the head any Psyker trying to poke you with "Warp spawned-powers"
    without permission. With a Exterminatus Class nuke.

    When they ask: "But, but ... wich Space Marine Chapter you are Dreadnought of?"
    *Gives a Stare and speaks in cold, robotic voice*
    "They, don't, exist."

    Let them draw conclusions on their own. For puns you could mark your primary chassis with Reasonable Marines regalia.;)
    And if asked for his Space Marine specialization he can say: "Commander Techmarine."
     
    Least Devotee likes this.
  17. NightWithMoon

    NightWithMoon Your first time is always over so quickly, isn't it?

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    I think you should focus on the battle in space, you've already made it clear that you're king on the surface - now the only threat is if they [either khornates or humanity] gain air supremacy and decide to exterminate you from orbit... to that end maybe you should bury a back up deep underground with a lot of armor to act as a seed you can recover from should the surface of the world be cleansed.
     
  18. greed11

    greed11 Your first time is always over so quickly, isn't it?

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    I agree. The options you gave, while interesting, are new. Continue with either the commander of tanks or ship battles. You built an emotional connection of the readers with those two. Capitalize on that.
     
    Jarudazuigu likes this.
  19. Threadmarks: Chapter 6
    Lazurman

    Lazurman That Others May Fap

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    Chapter 6

    Beustunia was a beautiful world. Or at least, it had been, before Chaos arrived. Not a proper Hive World, it was still in its development stage. Verdant fields of greenery brushed up against the developing cities, vast, deep oceans teemed with life, imposing mountain ranges stretched into the sky; the life of the planet had yet to be choked out by the smog and pollution of the Imperial war machine.

    From my many eyes in the sky, I could see it all. A green and blue ball so much like Earth. And Chaos had ruined it.

    The sky, once blue and (mostly) clear, burned red and purple as the barrier between the firmament of reality and the madness of the Warp grew thin, centered over the largest concentrations of the Khornate ravagers. If I couldn’t clean this mess up fast enough, Beustunia would become a Daemon World, consigning every soul on it to a fate far worse than death. Hell, the Inquisition would probably try and execute the populace to keep the existence of Chaos on the hush-hush even if the invasion was repelled. This entire universe as a whole was fucked to hell and back.

    Needless to say, that wasn’t happening while I still functioned.

    My reclamation of the Imperial wrecks was progressing apace, but I had yet to grok the inner workings of Imperial spacecraft. I dedicated more fabbots to the cause to speed things up, though it would be rather pointless if I couldn’t figure out a workaround for my lack of a Navigator. I didn’t have any templates for an FTL drive, so escape into the vast reaches of space wasn’t an option for me; for now anyway. At least I could evacuate the civilians to fortified zones on the other side of the planet I’d set up.

    It was a trial in and of itself actually getting the Omnissiah-fearing locals onto the transports, but the sight of Imperial Guardsmen and PDF working alongside me in ushering civilians aboard helped smooth things along. I suppose it was all very frightening and awe-inspiring to see all the huge and heavily-armed machinery at work for the poor farmers and laborers. I’d yet to properly encounter a red-robed Machine Cultist, but it was only a matter of time before it happened. They’d either sprout a tech-boner, or cry "HERESY!" Most likely both.

    An idle thought about the human body had me spinning off a sub-process to design a human-sized bot. I wasn’t a very creative person. So, I took inspiration from something whose design I was already quite intimately familiar with. The human body was a machine like any other, merely composed of flesh and blood as opposed to metal and circuitry. I knew the human body just as good as I knew my robotic one. Hell, I’d dissolved enough cultists in swarms of ravenous nanobots to know humans down to the cellular level.

    I wasn’t lucky enough for ROB to have given me a shipgirl body complete with tactile sensation like Ramble’s, or to have the right tech to create something from scratch like Fusou’s. I’d have to make one of my own.

    That is, not a shipgirl body, I mean. I still self-identified as male. I didn’t need the issues that a surprise gender-bend would give me on top of literally everything else.

    I used what I had, and what I had worked. The frame stood exactly six feet tall; its skeleton made of an alloy even stronger and lighter than titanium; its flesh was a flexible pseudo-plastic that could flawlessly mimic human skin in texture and coloration; ultra-thin stalks of opaque fibers served as my own blond hair; a miniature reactor powered both it and the micro-fabber concealed in my left arm, while the right incorporated some new 40k tech, a stripped down hotshot lasgun.

    Now if only I could find some of those fancy rings or a Jokaero so I could get some properly functioning laser eyes instead of these boring Mk. II eyeballs, that’d be great.

    By most appearances, I looked human. A psyker would give the game away if he cared to look. Otherwise perfect for my needs as an infiltration unit/diplomatic face. Wasn’t sure if they would take offense at my adoption of the human form—no, they definitely would take offense at that, at anything I did. Fuck ‘em. I was human long before any of these chucklefucks were, save the Emperor, the Sensei, and the Perpetuals. How hipster of me. Besides, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

    I wasn’t able to eliminate the uncanny-valley effect, though. My own innate love of symmetry, matching parts, and order meant my bot was perfectly symmetrical. Nothing naturally human was perfectly symmetrical. My movements were too precise, too…perfect. Every motion was calculated and executed with all the efficiency of the machine mind controlling it. Drawing upon my past experience seeing people walk, it was more than a little unsettling, all told.

    I could have done something about all of that. Spent more time in simulations fixing these design flaws. But I didn’t like lying to myself, or to the people around me. I was a machine. And nothing short of literal divine intervention would change that. (And the last thing I wanted to do was consider the theological implications of my existence.)

    I was a machine who once was human, but a machine was a machine was a machine. Not human.

    Fuck this train of thought, man.

    Point is, using one of these new bodies of mine, I was about to engage in my absolute least favorite form of conflict: social activity. I had enough problems talking to people when they weren’t instinctively itching to fill me full of bolter shells, for God’s sake. Alas, Cook had insisted upon a meeting with his superiors. He would be here as well, but he was still needed in his Baneblade, taking advantage of my reinforcements to wipe out the remaining Chaos Engines. Leaving me to explain my presence, my actions, and my existence to a bunch of suspicious zealots like as not to declare me silica animus and attempt to purge me.

    Life was just grand sometimes, wasn’t it?

    My Avatar body was a mile away from the firebase whose coordinates I was given. A low-flying dropship had dropped me off, leaving behind a modified Skitter to serve as my automobile.

    I revved the engine a few times for theatricality’s sake before zooming off along a paved road littered with craters and burnt out wrecks. Oddly enough, my fear of driving had been significantly reduced with the knowledge that no one would be hurt if I screwed up behind the wheel. Funny, that.

    Gun emplacements swiveled to target my approaching form, but held their fire. Pseudo-muscles clenched in a nervous gulp, though I had no saliva to swallow.

    Showtime.
     
    Last edited: Feb 6, 2017
  20. Lucky-38

    Lucky-38 On the house.

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    Ooohhh, that's the update you mentioned.

    Good shit, man, hopefully you can avoid falling into the Mighty Invincible SI trap that Drich did.
     
    Lazurman likes this.
  21. Lazurman

    Lazurman That Others May Fap

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    There will come a point where the SI is considerably more powerful than anything else in the settings he will eventually land in.

    Then there are some places on The List, like Crysis, or Worm, where he is abruptly reminded just how insignificant he really is.

    Well, until he finds the next upgrade that lets him come back and 'ave anuvver go, of course.
     
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  22. Lucky-38

    Lucky-38 On the house.

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    Glad to hear it, and I fully understand being able to roflstomp a huge array of settings as a PA commander. I just keep having flashbacks to how Drich's SI had her forces superior to her enemies forces in every single way for every single battle, even when it contradicted fluff.

    I remember somebody over on her SB thread pointing out that PA naval battleships have a max range of something like 500 meters, going by gameplay, while Supreme Commander battleships have ranges in the dozens of kilometers when you turn off distance compression. And yet, Drich's ships inexplicably outranged and outgunned her opposition. She also made them faster, used them better, and- Well, you get the idea.
     
  23. Lazurman

    Lazurman That Others May Fap

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    Eh. I'm really not going to be going by established 'canon' for PA. Those'd be some awfully small worlds, after all. For damages and ranges, I'm just going with 'better in every way in comparison to their modern-day counterparts...and then some'.
     
    Last edited: Feb 7, 2017
  24. Lucky-38

    Lucky-38 On the house.

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    It was based on a scale published by the devs. Lemme see if I can...

    Ah! Here:
    [​IMG]

    Battleship is a bit over 50 meters long, fires shells something like 10-12 times it's body length.
     
  25. Lazurman

    Lazurman That Others May Fap

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    Ain't arguing with you there. Due to processing power concerns, distances in PA are pretty goddamn wonky.

    Dinky little 500 meter range my pasty white ass...*grumble grumble*
     
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  26. Lucky-38

    Lucky-38 On the house.

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    Alright, it's up to you. Just pointing out what it is in the game, and why I was peeved at Drich.
     
    Lazurman likes this.
  27. Im_just_a_Reader

    Im_just_a_Reader IsekaI connoisseur for fun.

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    • Don't necro. This is against Rule 7.
    Why is he insistent on saving those humans if they're not trusting him anyway.

    It is obvious that he craved attention like an attention seeker.

    He'll die if not for the author holding everyone's fate.
     
    Jarudazuigu likes this.
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