Log #16
I have finished the nuclear reactor and have almost everything ready to go on that front but it seems I forgot one little thing, I don't actually have any fuel for the reactor. It's actually a bit embarrassing, I went and built the whole thing but forgot that I'd need fuel to run it in the first place, and it's not like this planet would have readily minable uranium nearby, that'd just be absurdly lucky.
There was just uranium relatively nearby, it was only half a mile out and buried about 100 feet down, don't know why my radars can search that far into the ground but I will not look a gift horse in the mouth, why is that even a phrase? If I thought a gift was bad or broken I'd definitely check it to see, the only reason I'm not checking this is that it seems to be working just fine.
Anyway I went out and set up a small outpost to harvest uranium and just ran a belt underground to get it back to the base, it'll take a bit to refine the raw uranium into fuel but it's just a matter of time now, I don't actually need to build anything more and the reactor should be running in a few days.
The production line for the laser turrets and robots is also up and running, I have already begun installing laser turrets on the inner wall. I am planning on installing them on the outer wall once the reactor begins to run. I have also begun installing robot stations throughout my base. Once I have a decent network up and running I'm going to make a second robot hivemind to manage the construction and repair robots. Because these dudes are dumb as all hell, I don't know if the hivemind on the combat robot has me spoiled but these dudes don't have any idea on how to actually move around, they are fantastic at building and repairing once they get where their going, but watching the robots try and get anywhere is painful.
The defense hivemind is doing wonderful things, the range and accuracy of my turrets have improved along with the coordination of the drone squads, the turrets have begun picking targets based on threat level rather than the chance to hit the target and they even cover the construction drones when they go out and repair the walls which while it isn't a goal I gave them to accomplish, it's still very helpful.
In worse news though, these improvements were necessary as the bugs have reached a new milestone again, there are now massive tank sized green bugs of both the spitter and bitter variants and a few new variants of the tiny nibblers, one that leaps at the wall and turrets and another with a small pair of vestigial beetle wings, it is not yet capable of sustained flight but they can certainly hover for a minute. So yeah dedicated anti air is my next goal with the turrets, and I am going to see if I can set up some of the un-networked bots to pretend to be bugs and teach the defensive mind how to shoot down aerial targets. Also need a name for the defensive hivemind, it's too long.
Log #17
The reactor is up and running and I have more than doubled my power production, so I should be set on that front for a while, and if I ever need to expand power production again it won't be nearly as difficult since I have a solid foundation.
The construction bot hivemind has been set up and is working better everyday, it knows what repairs are urgent and how to priorities the defenses repair in between attacks and to only do essential repairs during the attacks, I ended up linking the construction and defense nodes together, that's not to say I merged them, that wouldn't work with their differing prioritize and how they have both been developing, but now they can both communicate,.
The defensive mind will occasionally notice spots on the wall that either needs a turret added or removed. It used to ping me to get it done but now it just directly pings the construction mind. This has led to some odd turret placements in my opinion, apparently the defensive mind agreed with me on the need for dedicated anti air and has built turrets on their sides aiming up to accomplish that goal, that should be a decent stopgap till I can design something special for it.
In more fun news though, I've decided that if I am going to have a mind controlling the defense, and one controlling the construction that I want one running a logistics bot network, it'll be less running actual bots for this one though, more optimizing the production and making sure everything is getting the supplies they need, I want it to be able to plan basic additions to production lines and if I can figure out how, I want it to plan new mining outposts with the construction and defense bots, I won't be letting it out to try until I've ran it through plenty of simulations and training though, it won't take long as i like to think I'm getting rather good at training young hiveminds.
In some of the first bad news not related to giant bug attacks, I have been randomly passing out lately, a few days ago I even blacked out during a bug attack while I was on the wall, I fell off the wall but thankfully I was working on the inside of the wall, so I just crushed a bunch of belts and 2 assemblers on my way down, the shield the brunt of the damage but it focused on keeping my head safe and I still broke my leg.
I'll need to build some of the medical machines to fix my leg and figure out why I've been passing out in the first place. Once again the most damage I have taken is from my own factory, not the ravenous hordes of bug monsters outside it.
I also seem to have gathered a bit of a protective detail. There are 2 construction bots and 4 of the pistol bots following me around now. I'm torn between finding it cute or annoying.
Log #18
I built the medical scanner and it gave me some very worrying news. It turns out that breathing in smog from hundreds of machines while you're on a diet of tree leaves and dirt is bad for literally every organ in your body, who would've guessed.
I've been wearing a gas mask ever since I started wearing my power armor but I have still been getting contaminants from the trees and water when I eat or drink. The only organ that isn't significantly damaged is my heart, even my brain is showing damage from the repeated blackouts and stress from the constant battle and I have a weird clump of hyperdense neurons which is probably where the blueprints are stored, since it's showing the oldest scarring and the most new growth.
The only somewhat good news is that most of this is treatable and what isn't, like my liver, lungs, and part of my digestive tract can all be supplemented by some cybernetics. And it should even be an improvement on how they used to be.
The new digestive tract should prepare damn near anything into a state that my organic components can digest safely, my lungs will work with less oxygen and move it more efficiently into my blood streams, and my liver should be capable of filtering out most known diseases and just about anything that shouldn't be in my blood, I won't even be able to get drunk without turning off my liver, not that I could legally drink anyway, it will all be powered by an internal battery and charged by my power armor, but that isn't really a problem considering I never take my suit off anyway, and shoving a mini reactor inside my rib cage just seems like overdoing it.
There are a few cybernetics I might add that won't just be to keep my organs running though. I'm not going to be touching my brain just yet, but the rest of my body is really just a tool for keeping my brain safe and running, so it's not really harmful to upgrade it.
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A small cybernetic can be added that will improve my platelets and minimize how much blood I would lose from even a major injury, A bone graft that will increase my bones durability, what's essentially a steroid cocktail to improve my muscles strength and durability without adding significant mass. A gland to produce more efficient salvia to help with digestion even more and keep my teeth shiny, a coating on my teeth to make them actually shiny, reshaping the cones and lens in my eyes to enhance my natural night vision and give me greater vision overall and a small little backup pump that can replace my heart if I ever end up misplacing it. My blood pressure would be low and I wouldn't have a pulse, but my blood would be moving which is the main thing really.
The body has lots of little places that can be improved but by the end of this I wouldn't even break a bone from falling off my wall without the armor.
The operation should only take 2 days for the modifications to be added and another day to re-zip me enough that I can walk about, the medical treatments to fix the rest of my organs won't take more than 3 weeks to fix the worst of the damage, the wonders of modern mad medicine, Still I won't be able to do anything strenuous but only 3 and a half weeks to fix and upgrade most of my body
While I was going through my checkup and planning my own upgrades I set the construction mind and defensive mind to upgrading defenses combat drones, there is a new type of combat drone that uses a laser rather than bullets, its larger at about beach ball size but it moves to slowly to patrol, the defensive mind just moves them from their charging ports during an attack and stations them higher in the air to shoot down the flying hordes of bugs, oh yeah and the bugs figured out flight, or at the very least hovering long distances.
They still can't be called agile in the air but a wall of flying bugs coming at your face is still a wall of flying bugs coming at your face.
I finally got around to making the anti-air turret, it's really just a standard turret with larger barrels and a thicker explosive round that detonates when it hits something or after some time passes, its highly effective but I can't exactly go around installing them with my broken leg and there aren't many good spots on the wall to add them, it's already bristling with gun turrets.
So I decided to set the construction mind to the problem and it's been making a second higher tier to the wall to add the turrets to it. I like the look of it too, just a series of ever higher ledges bristling with turrets launching fiery death on the bugs, plus some guardrails on the interior half.
I have the logistics mind set up and running through training simulations, it should be ready to run a few days after I finish my surgery. So far it's looking promising though.
And just in case you wanted to know, some of the bugs are officially bigger than my tank and they show no signs of slowing their growth anytime soon. You'd think there would be a limit to how big a bug could get, you'd be wrong.
Log #19
The surgery was a success, I am still on the drugs to heal the last of my organ damage but I only need to take them for another week before I am a free man.
With this new lease on life I'm thinking that it's time to get to the next stage of this factory, wall 3, the outer outer wall. The decoders are calling for the most complicated liquids yet, the yellow and purple ones.
If you think I can just mix the blue and red liquids to get purple, you'd be very mistaken, it just explodes! I'd know because I tried just that! I had to repair a decent portion of the outer factory, it wasn't quite as big as a missile explosion but it was very unexpected.
So yeah, no cheating this system apparently, I will need significantly more room and resources to fuel the new production centers, which is why it's convenient that the logistics mind is finally ready to begin operations.
It actually took longer than I had planned for the logistics mind to finish its training, it kept trying to build on top of bug nests, which just made all of the simulated bugs very angry, so remedial lessons and a lecture from me on avoiding making the bugs even angrier than they already are and the logistics mind is working fine now.
But these simulations did actually showcase a major problem with the defensive mind, it's a defensive mind so it naturally sucks at attacking, it can manage a defensive line for weeks but if you tell it to clear out a horde of bugs it just has no idea how to, so I'll need to make a fourth hivemind with a more ‘proactive’ stance on attacking, and design some units for it to manage, we don't actually have anything suited for sustained attacks besides my super tank and that isn't exactly the massive behemoth it once was.
The next batch of blueprints actually has most of what I'm looking for, I can repurpose the rocket controllers to make the tank remote control, and I can use the spidertron mind on the tank to give it targeting systems, with the assault mind coordinating them they should be a force to be reckoned with, and I have ideas from that spidertron blueprint, expensive ideas yes but glorious ones.
If your wondering why I am not using spidertrons, its because they are stupidly expensive, one of my modified tanks is 1/5th the cost of a spidertron, yes the spidertrons are better and can be more easily modified but I just can't afford enough of them to field a significant force. I’ll do that when I have a bigger factory.
So yeah, I am going to set the construction and logistics mind to expand the factory and the defensive mind to defend that expansion from the bug attacks, it should be a fine trial run to see how well they do without me interfering.
Log #20
The trial was a partial success, all of the minds worked together splendidly and finished up the outer wall and the foundations within a week of building, the partial comes from the fact that the minds don't seem to plan with the future in mind, I had to reorganize some of the assembly lines and reroute enough resources to fuel the newer productions that we would be installing soon, it wasn't a large concern but it does mean that I can't just leave them to building the entire factory while i take a month long nap and then send up the rocket.
The most impressive display was from the defensive mind, its new walls are 25 feet tale and 12 feet thick, bristling with every turret available and patrolled day and night by squads of drones, the mind managed to repel every attack once it had a basic line set up and managed to make new strategies for dealing with a few new variants of bug.
The first of these variants was a bug with a reflective shell that would turn part of a lasers beam back on the wall, this was a simple one to stop though, it just made the laser turrets not shoot the shiny bugs, the more problematic one was a bug that would try and burrow under the walls, the defensive mind ended up using the mining drills to bury explosives and mines to kill the worms but they still managed to collapse part of the outer wall, it wasn't breached and the construction mind had it fixed within 10 minutes, but it does show a worrying level of intelligence in these bugs.
I've begun building the assault minds army, it's going to be formed of 3 vehicle types, the standard super tank, with beefed shields, thicker armor and a larger gun now, a larger heavily shielded and armored drone carrier, holding the newest model of assault drone and only armed with 2 small miniguns, and a lighter and faster tank armed with a larger flame thrower and with a missile system rather than a canon and minigun. Each tank will be powered with its own nuclear power to run it without fuel (besides the flamethrowers) with the drone carriers having 2 so they can rapidly charge their drones.
There is going to be another vehicle going with the army, it will take me awhile to even build a single one as I largely have to design it from scratch and the amount of resource I will be putting into it makes me seem hypocritical for not using spidertrons, but I really want to build this so I'm gonna. It will be my largest vehicle yet, 90 feet long and 40 feet wide walking on 8 large crablike legs, armed with a massive cannon that puts artillery to shame, dozens of laser turrets and smaller cannons for point defense, enough shield units that it could tank several of its own cannon shells without worry and armor to do the same even without the shields, enough nuclear reactors to run this monstrosity, drone bays so that it can field a truly massive force even without its supporting army, and why I am even bothering to build this massive over engineered monstrosity, it will be housing the assault minds decoder brains. I'm even giving it a stock of nuclear missiles to use if it needs them, this will be a true monster on the battlefield, even if it will take me a while to actually finish it.
With the assault mind being physically present with the army there will not be any risk of the army getting cut off from the assault mind by a bad storm or some as yet unseen bug variants, the assault mind will be able to range farther afield without significant risk than any other mind's forces. And with its influence being limited to its army I could even have multiple identical fleets in play if I had enough resources to fuel and build them.
With everything else coming along fine the last thing I need to check before my largest expansion yet will be confirming that my body is healed and ready. I'm going to be going through the most through checkup and confirming nothing is out of place even down to my very DNA. It'll take a day just to do the scan and another to process the data but it will tell me about absolutely everything wrong with my body and if I need to fix it.