Log #5

Year one Day 5

You know assuming Eezo was a normal thing you could make might have been a mistake, it was the substance the ftl drives actually ran on. I had thought it was just a variety of fuel or an unknown chemical compound, something I could make given I could make every element I knew existed and a fair few I didn’t. But no, nothing is ever that simple, it was an entirely new element and one I didn’t actually know the molecular formula for.

If I knew the conditions it was made it, I could just make it. But given I didn’t have any samples and the stolen information lacked any good information on it I was going to need to get a sample. And given it was mostly used in spacecraft, I was going to need to buy one.

That's where Byzantine came in, well the mind and Balistraia. We were already producing plorts, and the systems to sell them were largely automatic. Taking our plorts and selling them as various ranchers and then skimming that extra money off before it got sent to said ranchers? Easy, and that gave Byzantine starting capital, which they used to gamble, a bunch, until the money had quadrupled.

Then the mind had started a resale business buying cheap things and selling them for more through various front companies and websites. Now I think the mind was working on the stock market, which would have dramatically slower returns but the sample I wanted was already being shipped so I wasn’t that worried.

Setting an optimization AI on a non AI driven capitalist system was basically cheating. But the sample wasn’t going to arrive for some time.

The slime farming front has expanded by a few dozen androids and roughly a dozen machines, and it’s a much larger farm than any of the other ‘ranchers’ seem to be running. Already a steady stream of plorts are entering my factory and being refined.

Blue ones as basic metal enhancers, pink ones everywhere, cat ones some androids use, the glowy ones are being used as lamps on the dark side of the planet, the radioactive ones are going in radiation guns and reactors, the honey ones are being eaten by androids, the explody ones are being used in explosives and as fuel, The crystal ones just make bullet proof glass/ transparent metal, the quantumly uncertain ones are being studied and kept far away from anything that can die, The invisible ones let you make a paint that renders you invisible.

Got to say, the invisible one is the most interesting at the current moment. I can already block most sensors aside from light, this lets me knock that last one out and have entirely invisible stuff. I’d been working on that using invisible biters, but this lets me get literally everything invisible, that and the see through metal. It does mean that the YoRHa androids are essentially fighting in mini-skirts and or bodysuits again, but at least now there's armor under it.

The paint only lasts a day or so, but running shields stops the deterioration of the effect, So it needs to be reapplied but the drones can already paint and that just gets cycled into daily or weekly maintenance. A luxury one at that, given that unless you're going on a stealth mission everything being invisible except for you is kinda pointless, you have to make the android or machine invisible……. Wait I can do that can’t I? They are all plastic and metal, I can make both those things invisible. Well I already could but permanently rather than just short term, I don’t know why I’d need permanently invisible androids, or just drones but probably androids. Super spies? Making a bunch of invisible scanners seems like a terrible idea.

New project, invisible androids. I’ll bring it up with commander White when I get the chance, or Anenome. Actually just that council they formed. If I’m making a new android design they will be the ones building them. Mainly because they are giving me enough of a god complex as is.

But aside from rapidly developing new things, the range front has been calm. The only rancher near enough to risk discovering me is one Beatrix LeBeau, who while very adventurous sticks within a days travel of her ranch. It’d take her a few days to get here. Unless she uses the teleporters, also they have teleports apparently. Only point to point and I could technically do the same with the portals, but this is absurdly low powered. It doesn’t have the largest range, meaning its only planetary while the portal doesn’t have a range limit, but making a string of them to the asteroid belt would cost less power to run than a single portal.

They seem to use a fossilized and refined variant of the quantum plort, which the locals call a ‘strange diamond’. And it’s only kind of teleportation, it functionally works as it, but it’s not moving you so much as…. Tricking reality that you were actually somewhere else via quantum uncertainty. It says far too much about the nature of reality for me to be okay with thinking about it really. It destroys the thing at one end because there was never anything there and makes a copy of it at the other location because there was something there. If the latter didn’t happen both versions would only exist theoretically, until observed.

I don’t like that at all, especially as you can observe yourself and always are. Given you can feel your own limbs.

But if it works correctly it works well, and I already have a few running, objects only, to transport resources into and out of orbit. Once I start making and refining quantum plorts I should be able to mass produce the things, and maybe figure out how to trick reality into letting me duplicate things. Hate quantum physics though, or quantum anything.

The teleporters are actually already being used to build a moon station on the earth front, rather than building a shipyard in orbit of earth I’m just going to build one on something already orbiting earth. The moon has some metal and plenty of raw materials to convert into metal. Already got ten ship ‘bays’ working to build ten ships, once they are fully finalized and provided max resource and energy flow I will be able to build a full sized mining ship in one week in each bay.

Calling them bays isn’t the most accurate though, it's really ten factories/ refineries. Even without outside support when they are finished they will be able to operate with full effectiveness. One ‘bay’ can be seeded anywhere and start pumping out ships in just a week. They make the parts, fuel, and for the warships, ammunition. Each bay can service ten of my ships (if the mining ships somehow can’t service themselves either from damage or lack of supplies), meaning I can have one hundred of them at my current max capacity.

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And until I need more than that I’m not planning on building a dedicated dock yard, but if I did it’d maintain/ supply the ships while the bays just focused on building them. Really a mining ship could handle its own maintenance (and that of other ships) as long as it had materials, but the warships will be more specialized. Those will only be able to make ammunition and a small amount of repair parts.

Keeping ships just free floating or without a homebase is an option as well, it just increases the logistical difficulty of actually getting supplies to the ships and means each ship needs to rely solely on its own repair drone stock to repair or retrofit itself. And currently I don’t see the need to have that increased drain on my few space capable transports when I could just have them docked instead.

The minds are going to be controlling the ships for the most part, each one is getting an iteration of a mind. But the androids have a ‘captain’ model of android for naval warfare, and a navy which never really comes up, and they have asked to be allowed to man the warships. So I’ll be adding a bridge and small living quarters/ barracks for the android captains and sailors. Mainly because none of the minds are made to drive something this big, so they will essentially be working as crew and doing all the insignificant background tasks while the androids do the ‘driving’.

Balistraia could probably learn to drive one, and she will overtime, but there's no reason not to use a pool of skilled labor, and a few hundred year old android sailors are certainly skilled. Also long lived, given how they rarely got into face to face fights with the machines and the machines don’t do well with salt water.

Also still mostly girls in skirts using swords, though these ones have handguns. Well cannons are a more accurate term, but given I’d made the cannons they’ll work just fine. Apparently they used to use some hightech blunderbuss variants, and eyepatches of the same material as YoRHa blindfolds.

Some days I still wasn’t certain humanity wasn’t on the moon just fucking with me, I mean they are literal pirate androids. Why? Is it hard coded to have a theme? They talked with accents! One of them slipped up and didn’t use the accent! They fake pirate accents! Why?!?!

Okay I need to move on, that was worse than the ninja androids and it will continue to bother me as long as I fixate on it.

The Nauvis front! That's what we will talk about, its going.

To add more detail to that statement, with all the resources turned towards space stuff the assault hasn’t been going at the speed I had initially wanted and my strategic reserve is smaller meaning risking my current forces is less viable as I’d strain my stocks to replace them. Every ship needs drones, and those drones can’t exactly be on the battlefield and on the ships.

Still pushing out at a rapid pace though the expansion has already reached where the old portal used to be. And while the bugs have been fighting for every inch Balistraia is making it a fight heavily in our favor. Bulwark is working on all cylinders fighting off the attacks on all the new bases. The plan isn’t to kill every bug, its to kill every hive and build forts everywhere to hold the territory.

Meaning there are roaming packs of hiveless bugs rampaging through the backline as the frontline just rolls past them, and its falling on Bulwark to kill them as they hit the minds forts. Not really an issue if they fail mind you, given the transportation lanes are guarded by battle trains or negated entirely by teleporters but you can’t really call the territory secure if there are still bugs everywhere.

Not that its ever going to be considered ‘secure’ on Nauvis, even with my shielded undersuit I don’t leave my armor on that side. More than a few bug variants are both invisible and selectively intangible. Haven’t figured out the latter yet because when you kill something intangible it just falls through the ground. But then again more and more bugs have had adaption to prevent me from studying them, either via destroying the body or by turning the dead into bombs or something.

Does lead to the added issue of all battlefields becoming minefields and hazardous zones, but the defender drones are very cheap and can just set the things off after the fact. Not like the drone models good for much else at this point, a nine millimeter assault rifle doesn’t do anything to anyone, much less a pistol. I had made a few upgrade variants a few months ago but they were still bad, cheap, but bad. Now most of the time I replace the guns with cameras and use them for surveillance, but they aren’t even the core of that given radar and the fact I did the same for every other drone. These ones just don’t have anything better to be doing.

It says a lot that my bullets have increased in effectiveness by three hundred percent without my needing to modify them, and the fire rate on the defenders has gone from a bullet every three seconds to a bullet every quarter second and the things still haven’t been viable. And it's great to finally be able to say why the decoders were able to increase the effectiveness of the bullet blueprint without increasing the cost of anything. I’d been onto it slightly back with the fire thing, but actually knowing lets me better plan what to improve rather than worrying about unknowns.

I’d never bothered researching productivity beyond one hundred percent because I assumed you couldn’t get more than one hundred percent of the material out of a resource patch, I was apparently very wrong, and it can make material ex-nihilo, or rather convert non-ore into ore. At no extra cost, I feel a little dumb for not noticing the reality bending things going on, but when you're fighting for your life you don’t question those things too closely.

Especially when none of it is that obvious, it wasn’t like the ore was getting added into the train carts, and I could just assume that the vein was richer than I had thought.

Current plans are to continue space expansion, double our territory every week until the continent is ours, establish a proper front company and get the android fake identities working for said company, establish a militarily significant navy, continue to upgrade everything, and find out more about this specific iteration of humanity.

Oh yeah, and to survive to do all those things. But oddly enough I’m not that worried about it.