Log #51
The minds are handling all the new factories and coordinating all the resource shipments, along with building the second layer of the main factory and managing all the defense, at this point any contribution to a singular area I make is overshadowed by the sheer industry or might of the factory, Sure I can build a factory faster than a spider tron can, but I can't build factories faster than ten spider trons, and while my suit is one of the most advanced weapon systems the factory has, I don't really want to go charge bug hordes, and I don't think the minds want me to either.
So my contribution, while significant, is not critical or overwhelming for any particular task, and I needed to find something new to do, so I started thinking of problems the factory is currently facing, besides the obvious one of mutant bug hordes trying to destroy it, and then seeing what I can do about those problems specifically while the minds focus on the broader running of this whole operation.
The main issue I decided to tackle was actually a relatively major one, at least compared to all the other minor problems, and while it was a problem that was currently manageable. It could easily become a more significant problem farther along, to understand this problem I'll need to explain a few things, mainly about what resources the factory actually uses.
There is a bit of a skew in the materials different machines are made up of, and because this specific machine is relevant later I will use it assemblers as my example, the most basic assembler is something I could conceivably make out of mostly stone and clay, with only a little bit of copper to run the moving components and wiring, The next tier that can process liquids and solids would need to be made out of more durable and watertight materials, and the equipment inside of them that actually handles the water would need gold or other “noble” metals, especially if the assembler will be handling more volatile chemicals.
The second tier of assembler also needs to be more variable, as in easier to produce new things or implement new production methods or what materials go into the designs. This added variability is also what allows modules to do their work, they can make the machines do different things, whereas a module on a tier one wouldn’t actually have any components that can do more than a single thing. And all of these features mean that a tier two assemble machine needs significantly more advanced materials, but still mundane materials that can be found in large quantities. Sure gold, platinum, rubber and glass are harder to get and make than clay, stone, and copper but it's not a problem.
Then we get to the third tier, or as I refer to it “sufficiently advanced science”, any machine in the third tier takes materials that are either vanishingly rare or just hard to produce or purify, it's why my armies and machines aren't all the most advanced versions I can make, just because I know how to make something does not mean I have the supplies or throughput to make a significant amount of things, I don't even have words in my skull for half the materials that go into making a spider tron or a second tier shield generator. Presumably the decoders don't repair non essential information or something.
To actually get a third tier assembler I need to find and refine materials, like the tier 3 assembler needs one hundred percent purity gold, if it was ninety nine the thing would either break or just not run, it requires 5 different types of contaminant free gemstone, so I need to grow artificial crystals and gems, it needs mundane metals treated in exotic chemicals that take days to produce and days longer to treat, on some of the machines or parts I need designs etched onto them at a detail my eye can't see, nevermind that I can still make them by hand, that level of detail still takes awhile to produce.
Tier three is worth it yes, but it is not something that I can mass produce, and everything that is lost or damaged sets us back ages, and the problem with mass producing tier three is that they need rare or hard to process materials, this is the problem I have set out to rectify, and considering I don’t even understand why tier three needs those materials in the first place, I’m not going to do that by changing the recipes.
No, the solution I am going for is in why tier 3 things are worth it, and it’s not just because they work faster, though that is an improvement. It's in what they can do, a brick of steel made by a tier 1 assembler is weaker than one made by a tier 2, better construction materials having less faults and all that, this is taken even farther by a tier 3, all that advanced equipment does… something to anything it makes, and If I had to guess it would be changing the actual atoms in the construction to put them in a more “sturdy” position.
A tier 1 assembler turns materials soft so they can be easily shaped, a tier 2 assembler does the same thing but it can also turn liquids solid without freezing them and it is better at moving material in more advanced ways, meaning that while a tier 1 will leave structural weak points whenever it moves metal, or even just have an inconsistent density, a tier 2 will have none of those.
A tier 3 can do this on an even smaller scale, meaning it can turn both liquids and solids into different states, and probably gasses though I haven't tested, and then move the individual atoms making up that material, so if I sent a block of gold that was only 88 percent pure through and told it to make pure gold it could get pretty close, if not perfect, after significantly less time than my previous methods. This doesn’t help with materials being rare or just taking a long time to produce or make, but it does help making the purer or in some cases less pure materials.
My thought is this, if a tier 3 can move atoms, could a theoretical tier 4 move protons, neutrons and electrons without just detonating the whole building? And if it can will it be cost effective to use that to change mundane materials into more useful ones, or if its limited turn similar materials into other things, like more common metals into rarer metals, the energy cost for the more delicate features in a tier 3 assembler get exponentially less power efficient sure, but enough nuclear reactors and you can do anything.
Honestly, even if this whole thing is a bust, having a better understanding of how the assemblers work, and maybe even figuring out general improvements, if not a whole new tier, could be worth my time.
There are other things that I thought about working on, like getting a better material to make walls out of, or starting the space exploration thing, but well, the minds just shield the walls with 1st tier shield generators and there is already a plan to get into space, it just isn’t scheduled to begin for a month or two, so trying to make the assemblers break physics more than they already do is my new thing to do.
The second layer is still under construction, we officially have a runway/landing pad, and a few assemblers making planes and helicopters now, along with all the fuel and munitions they need, still need to get the expanded aerial drone production running but that's just a matter of time.
The rain is still continuing and the water level has gone up another few feet, but that is not really my problem, as it is not something I can solve, so I’m just going to ignore it and hope the problem fixes itself.
Log #52
Construction of new bases has continued at roughly the projected rate, and while bug resistance has once again become a problem, the loses they deal to my expedition forces are not at an unmanageable rate, after every battle I can replace the lost low quality drones by the hundreds and lost tanks by the dozens, if that actually starts happening I will have problems supplying and maintaining everything else sure, but I have the production capacity to do it. Actually the whole thing is more complicated than that, I could theoretically, depending on the tank type, build either more or less of them, but a dozen is for the shield tanks and those are essentially the base model anyway.
I am being hemmed in on essentially all fronts that are not underwater, and any expansion is a viscous and slow slog, but we still consistently win fights and we have yet to lose bad enough the Balistraias command tank is lost, damaged sure, even missing half its legs and most of its ablative armor a few times, but never actually totaled or lost, which is good considering its the only part of that army that would take more than a day to build.
Bulwark has been sending some more concerning reports though, all shielded walls that are under the water are drawing on significantly more power than their dryer companions, and it is not just at my main base, any outposts partially submerged, which is most of them, are showing the same thing, I don't know if its the invisible gel monster, there are still fish swimming near the walls, but whatever it is is causing Bulwark to get antsy, so now any outpost with a sufficiently robust electricity grid has the ability to discharge a quite concerning amount of power into the water, not to often as the accumulators need to recharge, but the shields in the water fail every fish within a few hundred feet of an outpost will either be dead or we can just call it immune to electricity.
Both of my offensive minds are also reporting that the bugs' adaptation and resistance to my weaponry has sped up, not significantly but it is a noticeable increase. My smallest variety of drone has actually become useless as anything but an improvised explosive/ ramming device, and it can still crash into invisible bugs I guess, even if the drones wouldn’t be able to kill it. It's not really necessary to take apart the assembly line for the drone, everything used in it is something used in other drones, so I can just have Byzantine route that into the other drones production.
Or I could keep producing them but add slightly thicker armor and have them serve as living shields, maybe even just put a grenade inside and have the armor designed so it fragments from a significant inside pressure while still maintaining heightened durability, I can make a bunch of the things, so making them with the intent to lose them is not a problem like the rest of my equipment, that goes mostly the same for the rest of the drones though, so I’ll have to think on it.
The experimentation with the assemblers has begun, and it is starting with figuring out how I build the damn things in the first place, as I may or may not have written before I don't actually understand how I build things, with simpler or smaller things I don't even need to look at what I am doing, I can just be walking around or discussing with the minds, as long as my hands are free I can build, and when I do pay attention all I really see are a bunch of parts just kinda flowing around or into each other with a complete disregard for physics, I’m pretty sure I could put a gear inside an airtight box without opening the box, I generally try not to think about it to much, as it freaks me out, but survival comes with sacrifices and watching my freaky magic with more detail is not that much of a problem.
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This does not change the fact that I do not consciously understand what I am doing, sure I know what pieces go where, even if that's more a product of repetition, but I don't know why everything is laid out the way it is, I tried moving around a few of the “array projectors”, the things that make solids less solid, and then seeing if the machine would still run. It did, it just didn't turn all of the steel brick into steel clay, only parts of it, and when the assembler tried to cut up the brick like normal the manipulators broke, so I learned that a tier one assembler does not have sensors inside of it to check if anything is wrong, which I suspected, and I learned that the array is like that to cover the entire inside of the production area, which I also suspected.
The next plan is to supercharge the projectors to see what happens, and then try swapping the projectors but not their locations to see if they all work the same/ do the same thing. I build them the same way but at this point I don't actually want to assume anything about anything.
The roof section has encountered no real problems, and Byzantine and Labyrinthine say it should be finished within a week and a half, which means that if the rain stops and visibility goes back up I will gain a significant edge over the bugs, cause more air force, and if the rain does not stop I will gain a minor advantage over the bugs, because more air force.
Log #53
The shields on two of my smaller outposts went down, and the damage the walls took before they went back up caused the walls on one of the outposts to collapse, so that whole thing flooded and a fair bit of the equipment was ruined, I wouldn’t say the outpost was lost, it just needs repaired, but the whole thing was still a hit to the resource supply, these outposts didn’t have enough power to actually warrant or use a… what would I even all it, a giant discharge defense, so we don’t know if electricity will even kill the things, still it's definitely the goo monster, that's exactly what the inside of my oil refinery looked like after it had gotten in.
Fire does seem to work at driving those things off though, or maybe it's just heating the water that does it, so the outposts were both repaired after Bulwark had lit the water on fire and driven off the gel things.
The second layer sections are still on track to be finished, and the basic materials for the drones are being manufactured, if not the final assembly, so pretty soon I will have even more production capacity that needs to be filled with resources! The best problem to have, I think.
The expansion of outposts that gather resources isn’t really capable of matching my overall production capacity, and my ability to refine the resources hinders both of them, I have been thinking of making a second “main” base that's roughly the size of this one and just setting it to refine the raw ore more, I already have outposts that do it, it's just not quite keeping up, and building more of those outposts takes resources to build, maintain, and defend them, and making a centralized location, while more devastating to lose, lowers all those costs while also making it easier to supply and manage.
So a few dozen tiny bases or one really large one, it's not like I’d be demolishing the tiny ones though, probably just take a fair bit of the equipment, I don't know, both ideas have merit and the plans the minds gave make them both seem valid, so they are leaving the decision up to me, which is odd because usually they just submit what they want to do and I either say yes or no, they don’t tend to give me different options.
The experiments with the assemblers have continued, I tried moving the projectors around, but nothing really happened, the machine still worked fine and I didn't see any changes in the finished product, so presumably the tier 1 assemblers all use the same projectors, don’t know if that will go for the other tiers, but it is a new thing that I did not know, so technically, even if nothing interesting happened, it was worth my time.
Now the overloaded projectors were significantly more interesting, those exploded, and in a neat way too. I supplied just a bit more power than they usually get and they just detonated, not even a noise preceding it, just a loud series of pops, and here's the really interesting part, the shards of projector that got scattered everywhere, they splattered when they hit anything, like a liquid.
I have a few theories for why that happened, but the leading one in my head is that the increased power caused the projectors to soften themselves, which meant that they couldn't maintain their forms and they exploded, whether that's because projectors build up a high pressure, or if that's just what happens to softened material when electricity is run through it is something I have yet to determine.
Log #54
This log isn’t going to be about the expansion efforts or about my experiments, this one is about Labyrinthine’s experiments. A span of time not to long ago I had asked for Labyrinthine to design a sort of metal mesh that could go under my skin, to allow the shielding effect to work on it, I specifically asked them to do it because they already design similar things for the walls, and while this one needs to be made of a thinner wiring, and also capable of moving with my body, Labyrinthine seemed up to the challenge.
A few hours ago Labyrinthine sent me a completed blueprint, and after looking the thing over I gave permission for the thing to be built and sent over to the medical bay, along with a bunch of other things, the second big one is the actual shield generator, which I designed to both not kill me and actually fit in my body.
The third biggest thing, and the last big thing going into this specific batch is the tiny tiny reactor that is going to be powering the shield generator, along with all my other mechanical internal organs, including my future additions. Replacing the fuel in the thing will be a trial and a half, but that's only like twice a decade at the rate my organs use power.
But yeah the underskin chainmail is defentainly the largest thing I have added to my body yet, your skin is the largest organ but you don't really think about that till you have to cover all of it, the thing even follows my optic nerve to cover my eyes, and my eyelids! It's going to be weaved into my ears and quiet literally every part of me that's exposed, and that apparently includes my teeth and the inside of my throat.
Itll cover my body in slight ridges, most of the things are around a hair's thickness, but a few, roughly one per limb wrapped around said limbs in a spiral, are thicker and are basically going to resemble veins, if veins filled with a golden or silver liquid, and yes the whole thing is in fact made of gold and platinum, these apparently conduct whatever energy the shield generators use to shield things, which I presume is similar if not the same as what the assemblers use to do the opposite.
My blood is already a kinda purple color from all the additives though, so adding some silver and gold to the mix is not a real problem, at some point I’m just going to replace my blood, if not entirely, the human immune system is complex enough to gives me a run for my money on constructing defenses and keeping that around will probably be helpful, even if I need to recode the thing to keep it from attacking my new bits and bobs, that's actually easier than you’d think.
So yeah, going into surgery to get my internal shielding and power source, what fun.
Log #55
The surgery was a success, and I weigh more now, I don’t know if adding 20 pounds of metal counts as putting on some more weight but at this point I will take what I can get, about the only thing I am still having any issues with is that the wires throughout my skin are kinda tingly, it's not often I notice, usually only after they trigger, like if I bump something. It still happens even if I am in my armor too, still I imagine I’ll get used to it.
The broader expansion efforts are continuing, and I decided on what I was going to do with the refinement stations, 2 medium ones, so losing one wont utterly cripple me and running and defending 2 of the things is easier than running a couple dozen, not quite the best of both worlds but I take what I can get.
The bugs have continued to get more resistant to my current armament, specifically fire and electricity, along with smaller caliber kinetics, making kinetics bigger is fairly simple, making fire and electricity more powerful? Well electricity is just a need for more electricity, but hotter fire needs fuel that burns at a higher temp, which is harder to manage.
The decoders do produce new recipes for better propellants but the rate my fire gets hotter is being matched and slightly exceeded by how fast the bugs are getting used to it, I mean it still works on the smaller bugs, less mass to reach critical temp and less room for cooling organs, but on the larger bugs I can basically coat them in fire and they will be fine for a fair while, eventually they overheat sure but it is not a quick thing.
So bugs are taking longer to die and I am therefore losing more and more bots with each engagement, which takes more resource to replace, which takes resources form my decoders, which means that my weapons advancement stops keeping up with bug adaptations, which means that the bugs take longer to die, which means…. I could go on, it's a death spiral on my part, solely centered around a lack of higher end materials.
Apparently I was not created with mass produced high end products in mind, just meant to cover a planet with low end rubbish, well calling anything I make low end is probably an insult, but I can be bitter.
I have been continuing my experiments now that the surgery is over with, which only really took me out for a day, the actual surgery and the observation period after, not that I’m not being observed now mind you. Mainly I have been looking at my own ability to soften objects, or liquify them. I don't have projectors in me, I think, which leads me to believe the projectors are more generators and that they produce an energy and direct it, and that my body can do the same thing ‘naturally’, I can even seemingly liquify objects and soak them in through my skin or armor, and I have been doing this without thinking for a fair while, it was just instinct. I went through a bunch of medical scans and the minds and I could not find where the objects went, and it wasn;t just small things either, it was whole bricks and steel beams, even a few tiny mechanical contraptions.
They just go into my skin and when I want or need them they flow right back out into my hands, or out of my feet and across the ground, depending on where I want it, the really weird thing is that I already had a bunch of my tools and random materials inside of me, my armor doesn’t even have pockets and I just never noticed the tools forming in my hands, or how I had the material to build a whole oil refinery just on me, the thoughts never even entered my head as something strange.
Sometimes I regret noticing things, and this is one of those times. Still now I have another thing to figure out, my own limitations, what all can I store, where does it go, what things can I do with this. Lots of questions, don’t know if I want the answers.
I have also noticed another thing, everything I don't understand in this factory has a tendency to explode when I mix it with another thing I do not understand. Mixing the science liquids to make new colors, get an explosion, over charge the projectors? Explosion, put a shielded brick in an assembler to see what happens? Make a guess, great you win, it exploded.
It wasn’t a particularly violent explosion, comparable to a few grenades, still caused me to jump quite a few feet into the air though.
I did also manage to supercharge a projector without breaking the thing, and the results showed some fair promise, the trick is to keep all the vital bits farther from the liquify bits, makes the thing bigger sure but when needs must, the single projector I did this to liquefied parts of the brick, not just softened, and also softened a fair bit of the metal behind the brick, which makes me want to stick the thing on a drone, though power costs make that currently infeasible, I could just have a swarm of drones that can tunnel through rock and bug alike.
Maybe if I increase the range I can make it on a tank or something, or mount it on my armor, this has possibilities.
But I don’t know what else I can learn from these weaker machines, so later I plan on disassembling a few tier twos and maybe a tier 3.
Things are looking simultaneously up and down, depending on the front. So I guess that makes this situation neutral, which is good for staying alive I suppose.