Schlock Mercenary

Not sure if it's very expensive, or Ridiculous Future Inflation. Was the cost of something more relatable mentioned somewhere?

Okay hold up, I think you're counting it as long scale billions? Then it'd be the same scale as this contract. (Billion = 10^12 = tera)

Things have been chiefly counted in no less than kilocreds, so there's a little bit of inflation.

edited 6th May '16 2:51:35 AM by Adannor

On the other hand, none of the purchases or costs that have been discussed are exactly going down to the corner convenience mart for a candy bar...

The cook's change left over from a shopping run cost was 2.1 thousand creds. And given how worried they were about the loss, it's not a trivial amount.

They got Petey for 3000 kilocreds. That's three attorneydrones. And stripping down his guns would apparently sell for about 3 million kilocreds.

edited 13th May '16 1:23:42 PM by Adannor

New plot twist!

In hindsight we actually should have seen this coming. Surviving in a vacuum is not a trait that's very likely to evolve naturally, and both of the previous species we saw that can do it (Amorphs and Gatekeepers) were the result of bio-engineering.

The question would be why, given that this is clearly not that hard to deduce, and those "physiological'' specs are apparently basic library data, these people are acting like it's a new discovery.

Well, that explains a lot - I was going "Okay, if they don't need to breathe, what the hell are they using for an energy source?" Turns out it's solar power. Perfectly sensible.

Apart from the problem that you can't really extract enough energy from that sort of area - even with magic 100% efficiency - to run an active living being. Top-up reserves, maybe.

Maybe they just eat fuel cells? Or maybe whoever designed them just imitated (or improved upon) a biological digestive system. After all, it's quite versatile and robust enough to power our own civilization.

Just because they're robots doesn't mean they're self-powered. Eating is a time-proven method of remaining functional.

edited 16th May '16 3:36:56 PM by Brickman

Or are they biological/organic hybrids of some kind? Is solar power the only way they gain energy? There are still a lot of options here. Maybe they are simply a silicate based life form whose brains naturally function like computers? like Discworld Trolls. Still, eager to see what this means.

Para calls them "late-phase output from somebody's mechanical replication experiment." That sounds like, to me, "someone was playing with self-replicating robots and forgot about them." So they evolved, just mechanically and they had a good starting point.

edited 16th May '16 8:34:12 PM by Discar

The inflation thing works out as less worrying if you remember that we don't know what the equivalent of a cred actually is. It could be like a cent, or a yen, or a won*, at which point the inflation is far less enormous. Alternatively, you could use this site to compare historical currency values to modern ones, and just look at how realistic that actually is, even measured in dollars or pounds. A quick check gives us a relative value of the pound in 1500 compared to 2000 as anywhere from 467:1 to 222500:1, depending on what metric you're looking at, with an 'RPI calculator' giving an average of about 494:1. And note, this is from 1500, not 1000, so it's about half the time difference back as the Toughs are forward of us. Yeah, I could see kilocreds (where a 'cred' is about a USD) as a workable currency.

edited 20th May '16 1:39:03 AM by MattII

Ho-lee sh*t, Petey can shift entire worlds now? He might not be a god in the traditional sense, but I think most gods in traditional sense would probably give up their god-hoods for the power to do that.

Well, its *probably* just a (crazy) power scale issue.

Yeah, it's just power scale. But if he disabled any opposing TAD fields covering the planet, it'd be chump change for his core generator.

Actually, there's an organisation factor in there as well. For the most part, a ship, even a battleplate can get by with a few teraports, but this thing is the size of the moon, so I don't think it's done by just one unit.

He didn't actually teleport the sphere away, he just hid it somehow.

That was my thought too, that maybe he didn't actually Terraport Osiri away, he just cloaked it and made it look like that was what he did. Given this is Petey.. I could totally buy either option from him.

Well, I figure the battle was Petey buying time to build the MOTHER of all Teraport cage systems.

I suppose they remember to the last 'Plate that got stuck in an Op in conflict with the Toughs

(Not that this was the Toughs fault. Much.)

'The important thing is, battleplates were destroyed and we were nearby.'

Fair's fair, the Tunguska really wasn't their fault, and they had no control over Tagii when she took out the Morokweng (and the AI in question is still around to answer questions if they want to query it). Also, both (UNS) commanding officers were clearly involved in illegal activities at the time.

Yeah, but that argument doesn't work if the rogue AI who killed Tunguska is working for them again. And has a speaking part in this very scene. And is currently armed with a weapon that could probably kill a battleplate (but not its escort).

And in any case, the "they killed battleplate" thing is only half accusation of wrongdoing and half acknowledgement of how damn dangerous the Toughs are when backed in a corner. And they didn't stop being that skillful during the timeskip.

Well. Crap.

"I'm not calling for a purge. Sure I want all the dissidents gathered together in one convenient location, but I'm totally not calling for a f***ing purge."