Schlock Mercenary

Running from potential. When you are immortal, "we might get hit by a gamma ray burst in a million years" suddenly becomes something you actually need to worry about.

Virtual Tagon and Petey might have a clue what everyone's running from:

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2019-05-05

Seems more like Peteys idea of the biggest battery in ever <.<

Edited by 3of4 on May 5th 2019 at 4:23:23 PM

I figured it's an artistic depiction of the Zero Point Generator originally spun up by the F'Sherl-Ganni that Petie seized.

Naw, thats *is* Core, this thing is only near it.

And given that it's said to exist to deliver more energy than said Core Generator could output on its own <.< yeah. Big boom.

That's literally what the comic says, it's Petey's energy capacitor/battery that he's using to send the team out of the galaxy.

I like the tech guy's sense of humour:

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2019-05-06

You know, even knowing I won't understand it, I kinda am curious as to the math.

I'm curious—is this a representation of a virtual space like the All-Star, or does this ship have actual space for physical people to walk around? Because that seems like an inefficient use of space to contain an entire galactic civilization.

They need the space. Remember how long they've been out there, and what tends to happen to population sizes over time.

I think that the Hrath'i (?) built the ship with lots of wriggle room, and ended up with something the size of a planet as a consequence. Remember Petey said that it was so big it had to be round.

Edit: and you forget that there is more than one civilization onboard...

Edited by TamH70 on May 6th 2019 at 9:05:48 AM

That's what I mean. I don't think that one ship, even planet-sized, could hold trillions of physical people (that's how many ancient oafans there were). A giant computer like the All-Star filled with uploads seems simpler.

Hrathi are the guys that called them. I don't think we got the name of these guys at any point.

I do think these guys are meatbodied though. They looked on when they were porting the raptors. They do mention resource limitations, which would include living space needed, but they apparently did get enough spare to survive with the raptors on board.

They also can be a limited amount of embodied keepers while majority are in the digital archive. Oafans also had a similar setup going, at least until their AI decided to nope the hell out of the galactic affairs.

Confirmation whose battery it is.

This honestly seems a little uncharacteristic of Petey. Maybe it is earth-shatteringly important, but it doesn't seem like that terraport was very time sensitive. Not enough to knowingly leave himself vulnerable like this.

What confirmation, the ownership already was super clear in the previous strip. Also he just had a discussion with Tagon that the teraport should be happening immediately after he delivered his probes so close to the ship.

Though the capacitor is probably not something he can re-charge enough in just a couple days anyway. Right from the get-go, he knew he was going to spend everything on this diplomacy ship.

Edited by Adannor on May 6th 2019 at 8:33:29 PM

There's a difference between "spend everything" that means "high opportunity cost", and "spend everything" that means "high probability that your enemy gets an irrevocable foothold that they use to kill your whole civilization".

Thing about size and population is, after a certain point, when you're immortal, why bother having more kids? At a certain point I'd expect population growth to slow to a crawl, if not just completely stop. That and if a lot of them are being stored digitally, they could have plenty of trillions in server racks.

Having somebody new around to talk to may be a pretty solid motivator to keep procreation going. It's seventy millions years locked in a constructed metal ball after all.

Though if Bradicor (people that made the amorphs) manages 12, they could go for 70 too. With nothing more than peeking at the other civs going around their planet (note, planet only, they didn't have high interstellar tech) and controlled senility.

This page does seem to imply that Petey is spending more power than he has to spare on this project. Yeah it's important, but not so important that he couldn't have shaved down some of the power requirements. If his energy budget is really this tight, then sending a ship, even just with mindframes, seems like a waste. Just calling them likely would have been enough.

My guess is that it's just a temporary hole in his defenses, and it will be patched soon enough that there shouldn't be any problems. Of course there will be problems, because otherwise why mention it, but still.

The DM Es are using a strategy that seems to be designed specifically to capitalize on any momentary lapse in Petey's defenses, and Petey knows this fact. Even if he gets that thing back up and running in 20 minutes, that'll be 20 minutes too long.

He can't "just call", he doesn't have actual hypernode address from their probe, only the vague coordinates. And it may be that in the comic's physics, sending anything big enough to signal for a connection would cost this much, whether or not it had some mindframes on it. Majority of the mass would be taken by the annieplant and other unavoidable equipment anyway.

Edited by Adannor on May 7th 2019 at 6:58:30 PM

Bad luck.

And named...

I wonder if those dinosaurs would appreciate the tiny mammal things calling them "dinosaurs", especially when they find out what it means.

All apologies.

Well, time for the UNE to stop trying to be all grand galactic manipulation and actually fight the enemy. Wonder if they'll have a moment when they realsie how much Petey was shielding everyone from the Panuri.