Space and everything in it

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>alien races
The full range of rubber foreheads, to incomprehensible blobs of tentacles. Keep in mind a significantly advanced race can look like whatever it wants to, and might create humanoid bodies or avatars for interacting with primitive humans. If they are significantly alien, they will probably not be able to live in the same environment or communicate verbally with us.
>ship interior/exteriors
Most ships, particularly warships, are unmanned. The ones that do carry passengers tend to have layouts that would seem unusual to somebody who's used to living on planets. Any surface can be a wall or floor, and there are no decks. "Skyscraper" layouts are just as naive as spaceboats. If anything the introduction of gravity control only makes this worse.
>crewman designs
Most ships are intelligent, most crewmembers are cybernetic.
>space weapons
Spinal mount coilguns, not raillguns, are used for long range fire, as raillguns are limited in their max velocity. Missiles, and anti-missile lasers also exist, but most ship to ship combat is Kinetic. Dog-fighting is preformed by destroyers and disposable drones.
>otherworldly monsters
Many alien races either look monstrous, or have monstrous motivations. Sometimes these align, but it's a mistake to think cosmic predators will look anything like the creatures which preyed upon your evolutionary ancestors.
>maps
HEXAGONS!

Few days ago we had a quite an interesting thread () about possible extraterrestrials, what would they look like and how alien their minds and societies might actually be; wish we had something similar to that again, something with some sort of a theme that we could seriously discuss instead of a simple image dump

I'm working on it user

Well I mean its not really a setting so much as a oneshot space horror thing. Your standard derelict ship that the party explores, etc etc

i really like this ship

are there others with a similar look?

Reminds me of this one from Star Citizen

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I love vertical ships, and ships with no distinct back or front with lots of articulation.

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>vertical ships

fuck yes.

>no distinct back or front with lots of articulation.

Are you me? Love this shit for my aliens.

Good taste friendo.

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>Vertical ships
Space vaginas to balance out the overabundance of space dicks.

Way too symmetrical to be Caldari.

Dejah Thoris created my fetish for brown people.

Also kinetic energy weapons a best, directed energy weapons a shit.

how do i complelty fortify a system? assume that FTL has to stop outside of a solar system and ships have to cruise in STL

How mega do you like your mega-structures?

Build massive underground and underwater networks on populated planets. This won't help you if the enemy is willing to destroy populated planets, but if that's true you really can't defend a system from them and it's better to run.

Anything that can't be burred underground or underwater should be as distributed and decentralized as possible. Suburbanize everything and spread it so thin that it won't be worth Rodding from orbit. Forget satellites, expect to lose all of your orbital infrastructure on the first day of the siege. Make sure all your communications networks have wired backups, and make sure those wired networks are decentralized, massively redundant, and underground.

The most obvious planet based weapons are surface launched missiles. These will be relatively large, the size of today's satellite launch vehicles. Build as many as you can, and hide them in underground or underwater silos. When the time comes, launch them into retrograde orbits all at once, while the enemy fleet is on the far side of the planet, then time it so they all pop over the horizon at the same time to overwhelm the point defenses.

Some suggest leaving a dumb box of dirt in a retrograde orbit so the enemy will crash into it, but any smart commander will expect that and plan a conservative orbital insertion to avoid any kinetic surprises, you'll need guided munitions to catch them. Remember they can dodge and you can't.

The other option is lasers. While most wavelengths are absorbed by the atmosphere, some such as radio waves can penetrate even seawater. You also have an advantage in that you can have a bigger power source and use the entire planet to cool your laser. Have a fleet of submarines with nuclear or fusion reactors carrying flexible antennas. Three subs meet up in the middle of the ocean, stretch an antenna between them, and zap orbiting enemy ships. When the enemy triangulates the location of your attack, the subs jettison the antenna, and swim away.

I like it. Maybe armour and countermeasures developed much faster than weapons, so most space battles are just two ships in slowly expanding debris fields, trying to melt each other.

At the end of the battle, the winner flies about and scoops up all the valuable bits, usually bolting them straight on if the connections can be made to work.

The last one was themed around one user ranting about another user's furry waifu.

That was me. SorryNot actually sorry.

I want to do time dilation in my game as the BBEG's innate aura to end the whole campaign, but I'm not sure exactly how it will pan out and how to implement it. Can any lovely aspiring astronauts in this thread give me some pointers or tips?

"Space-Clunk" is an awesome name.

I want to put my players in a large fighter or Millennium Falcon like ship. Is there any good RPG that handles one ship really well?

Practical or not, I'll always have a soft spot for thunder wells when it comes to surface-to-orbit defence on the cheap.

Problem with any sort of kinetic weapon launched from a planet, is you have to impart all the velocity on the surface, which means you will be fighting the atmosphere the whole way up.

So there's no stealth in space, if we're playing by hard sci-fi rules. Other people have written longer posts on the subject so we're just going to take it as a given.

Fortifying space is even harder. You can't build a wall - or if you can, you're probably not worried about invasions anymore.

But there are still options.

1. Panopticon: Cameras everywhere. If a fly farts on the dark side of an asteroid, you'll know about it. Light is slow, and space is big, so it's not just about cameras. FTL packet-ships popping in and out to get a faster-than-light picture of the system are mandatory. Any civilization worth its salt will have one of these going. They're cheap too, relatively.

2. Access control. It's very difficult to protect a planet from someone who wants to destroy it. Planets are hard to move. They follow nice, predictable paths. You can set a kinetic impactor and let it cruise in at some pleasant fraction of c and the planet can't dodge.

But if you're worried about invasions or weapons that require an orbit to deploy, you can mine your own orbit. A few thousand tonnes of ball bearings (or, if you're being fancy, micro-drones with stationkeeping fins that use the nearest star to steer) will make any invader's day difficult. Safe "lanes" and safe approach vectors can be calculated, but you've been smart, and kept a few cannisters of ball bearings in orbit just in case. If the enemy maps your lanes, you can cut them off.

You don't have to use circular orbits either. Nice elliptical orbits can increase the relative speed of the "Kessler mines" at the cost of increased maintenance.

That's why I said keep your defenses planet side, and hope the enemy isn't willing to commit genocide. Anything orbiting the planet is going to be an easy, visible, target. But hiding things below the surface of a planet is the best exception to the stealth in space rule.

The ball bearings in orbit thing probably won't work though. It would be trivial for the invaders to either avoid them entirely, or just laser broom them out of the way. Kessler mines are more likely to be used by an attacking force to prevent the defenders from launching counterattacks.

3. Obscurity: be somewhere they aren't looking. If you need to build a secret military base, put it in some obscure bit of deep space so far from the nearest system that the light from engines won't reach anything of interest for decades. Build a dozen false installations and move them around.

Alternatively, go hide in something noisy. Any planet with an atmosphere is good, particularly if there's multiphasic activity (oceans), vulcanism, or strong magnetic fields. Anything that absorbs light (you can /probably/ avoid emitting penetrating radiation) is good. Anything entering or leaving the location risks revealing it, of course.

5. Decentralize and Deceive: Spread the good stuff around. Obfuscate your supply lines. Build false command posts with big flappy flags, then build false secret sensible bunkers. Have habitat modules that turn into missiles, and missile clusters that can be refitted into hospital ships. Make everything modular.

6. Threaten: Make it abundantly clear that anything fucking around gets vapourized, and then the vapour gets dragged into a magnetic funnel and interrogated. Leak details of weapon systems (non-mobile, obviously. Wouldn't want to scare the neighbors) that give military porn fans a boner and everyone else nightmares. Put big fuck-off clusters of weapons all over the place. Blow up a passenger liner every decade or two just to show you mean business. And make it clear you're willing to level your own infrastructure to deny it to any enemy.

No Stealth for anything emitting any kind of recognizable signal, such as human body heat alone being detectable from several AU, about 500 million kilometers, away.

Since you're playing defense you can cover up missiles and other weapon platforms that are unmanned and can stay nice and cool. They have a layer of rock on them and then you just need to put them on orbits to foul up anything attempting to come in the easy way. They can either burn harder to go around and keep the weapons out of range, or fight through the weapons and get softened up if not outright killed. Since these objects are cold and covered in rock they will not easily be detected until the incoming ships are a bit too close, probably unable to change course and get out of their range. When the camouflaged weapons wake up they'll fire up their own engines, probably cast off their rock shell unless it doubles as armor, and make sure they stay in they way of the incoming targets. This will likely make the incoming targets burn harder to stay out of range too.

So there you have that, cover unmanned stuff in rock and put it in the way of all the easy ways into the system.

Yeah, hide your last-line-of-defence weapons planetside. I like the submarine-assembled laser idea.

Ball bearings in orbit do work... temporarily. They take time to track, and there's always the chance the one cluster you didn't map (or that the enemy deployed late) hits you.

And you can put up a /lot/ of them. It's entirely possible to saturate quite a few orbital bands and make "dodging" very difficult. With solar reflectors for control, you can even have the bands shift ever-so-slightly to make tracking a headache for even a well-prepared enemy.

I feel like an invading enemy, if they take proper precautions, would have plenty of time to track the ball bearings while they are trashing every last piece of orbital infrastructure the defender has. They just need to stay in high orbits. Incidentally this is also the best defense against surface based missile and laser attacks.

As with any siege, you start by drawing a wide perimeter to cut off their supplies, and then slowly creep closer until you can overcome their static defenses. Only instead of trenches you have orbits, and instead of walls you have the planetary atmosphere.

Sure if you rush in like an idiot, expect a bucket of dirt on a retrograde orbit, launched from the far side when you weren't looking. But if you have enough laser gunships in high orbits, and enough time to do a proper sweep, you can more or less claim total orbital control. Anything they put in orbit has been swept away, and any new launches will be intercepted as soon as they leave the atmosphere.

Stealth is actually slightly trickier than that - having mass at all can be enough, given the right cameras and a bit of prep time.

Drop a dozen drones into system out of the stellar plane, probably well above or below it. You know where all the major bodies are, but take photos anyway. Lots and lots of photos. Drop back out of system to a nearby invasion point. Put some fancy computers on the task. Map every solid object in the system larger than a dime.

Once you've got a map, you know where the possible locations of every weapons station is. Laser and kinetic weapons have a minimum mass, kinetic weapons especially. So now you have safe zones.

First wave in is clearance - nuclear or better. A bunch of warheads with engines jump in and burn incredibly fast and incredibly hard for anything that might slow the second wave down. Countermeasures won't help much - the weapons aren't precise and there are too many attack vectors.

Immediately after comes the 2nd wave. This wave is more sophisticated. It targets anything that survived the first wave, plus targets too delicate to nuke. It's also completely expendable.

Third wave is the actual precision weapons, including ground invasion or boarding actions.

Assuming they have spies or time, then yes, the Kessler mines are useless. But they are cheap, they provide good propaganda value, and they will slow down any invading force that can't spy, won't spy, or doesn't want to nuke the upper atmosphere to clear them. Just because you know the location of the clusters doesn't mean they can dodge them reliably.

High orbits are usually safe, but again, elliptical orbits.

A slow creeping siege doesn't really work - space is too big to close off every single escape route if you're determined enough. The same reasons you can't build a fortress dictate that you can't bar the gates. But once you have full orbital control, you're correct - any new launches are trivial to intercept.

>directed energy weapons a shit.
Easy there friend. The glitter of an energy beam is a lovely sight.

Vertical ships a best.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't orbits get slower the higher they are?

A Kesler mine in an elliptical orbit intersecting a ship in high orbit would have a slow closing velocity, making it easier to notice or deflect, or even just shrug it off with armor because the relative velocity isn't so high.

The reality of orbital mechanics gives the advantage to the attackers when it comes to kinetic weaponry. Relative velocities will be higher in lower orbits, meaning it will be easier to hit something launched from below than it will be to catch something orbiting up above. And I don't think the attackers are going to be stupid enough to rush into low orbit and throw that advantage away.

Anything crazy enough to build a megastructure didn't do it for reasons we can appreciate. There isn't much you can do with a 100km building that you couldn't do with a 1km building. There are a few things - energy collection, particle acceleration, raw computing mass - that get better as they get bigger.

But why build a 10,000km starship factory when you could 10,000 1km starship factories and hide them all over the place?

There's also a limit on how big you can build something without using unobtanium. At a certain size, given phase curves, you're just building a planet with a molten core... or a custom very cold star.

So I'd say megastructures should either be monuments or mostly incomprehensible.

>worried about hard sci fi
>first point already includes "mandatory" ftl
I mean, just use a fucking cloaking device at this point

You can call it a mandatory cloaking device if it makes you feel better

Incomprehensible megastructures are the best kind though.

Especially the kind advanced civilizations build as pranks, but end up destroying primitive societies because they devote their entire civilization to trying to understand or control the mega-structure.

Haha, you need to brush up on your Kerbal Space Program and get some real practice with orbital dynamics and intercepts. Or play Children of a Dead Earth - it has guns.

Circular orbits get "slower" the larger they get... but elliptical orbits can be very quick. Imagine an oval with a dot on one end. The dot is your planet. Far from the dot, your mines go nice and slow. But as they fall in, they speed up - way, way up. And then they speed past, slowing down as they drift out.

Plus it's all about relative velocities - "slow" and "fast" don't matter if your closing speed is vast. Altered orbital angles are good ways to do that.

Would you rather be hit by a car going 5km/hr or 20km/hr? Ok, but then, imagine you're in a car going 200km/hr on a head-on collision course.

Deep meson sites.

Mesons are cool things. Collect a packet of them, aim them at something and when they run out of energy (the amount of energy you put into them to fire them determines range), they explosively decay, wherever they are. Except...they go thru anything, like neutrinos. With practice you can get them to decay INSIDE an enemy ship.

Now the fun part. Remember Cheyenne Mountain, home of NORAD? Dig a bigger hole. Deeper. Deeper still, like, under 8-9 kilometers of rock. Make it big. Really big. Put a fucking huge fusion reactor there. Then...build your gun. The mother of all guns. You're on bedrock and stationary so weight isn't really an issue. Volume is only limited by the limits of your materials science and civil engineering. Power? You're on a planet. Plenty of space for reactors. Really, the only limits are how powerful a beam you can generate and direct, the number of guns you can afford, and your accuracy. You could literally shoot through the planets core, with the bolt coming out strong and coherent on the other side before it goes off inside a dreadnaught. Not that it needs to, because its an area effect weapon. Get enough accuracy and you could hit targets in the asteroid belt or farther...with a gun under 10km of rock.

Why shouldn't everyone do this, then? Well, for one thing, if mesons can be directed, there may be a way to shield against them, which might not mean all that much for a gun that big. The site is immobile, so if you can find it, you might be able to infiltrate or bombard. The armor on the deep meson site is good, but that might not mean much when you can stand off and bombard the thing with kinetic weapons for forever...if you can hit it. I mean, how do you find the 10 cubic kilometers you actually care about on a continent? Plus, realistically, if you're in accurate range, it is too. Also, the thing is expensive, and requires a lot of technology.

(Con't)

I guess the real reason, though, is that as cool a gun that size is, you don't really NEED that size to do so much damage. A smaller meson gun that can be mounted in, say, a battleship, or...several battleships... can probably get close enough to return fire if they can locate the site. And as powerful as that kind of gun is, it has a finite fire rate. With good intel to locate the site, and battleships you dont mind risking, with strict EMCON, stealth materials and the so-critical element of surprise, you might get enough near misses to collapse the place or cut power. Maybe the gun's meson shields may not even be up! If you're spotted, however, imagine being fucked by the biggest horse dick science could ever invent. That ejaculates enormous coherent packets of subatomic particles that explode inside your ass. From halfway across the solar system.

Mesons are cool things.

>mandatory cloaking device
Sure! But then it's less easy to invent scenarios for building a planetary "fortress".

If you add telepaths, a race of teleporting catgirls, reactionless drives, and weapons that shoot particles of negative mass you might have a cool setting (or... not), but you sure make it tricky to offer plausible setting advice.

I mean, I can offer /narrative/ advice, because we've gone from worldbuilding to storycrafting, but the advice will apply just as well to a fortress full of goblins.

>Having FTL

Sure, for Mass Effect-type settings with humanoid aliens with comprehensible motives. Pranks are a legit thing in that type of setting (and can be excellent. Have you read "Strata" by Terry Pratchett?)

But for hard sci-fi, a "prank" is a very human-centric term. Having some forgotten bit of technology smack into a world is vaguely plausible though - space is big, but if you build an antimatter factory in a system 500 million years ago, life might arise just in time for bits of it to deorbit...

Or run into the nearest star...

Hey, it was an assumed constraint from the requester.

>But why build a 10,000km starship factory when you could 10,000 1km starship factories and hide them all over the place?
Kind of hard to build a 1km starship in a 1km facility, so let's compromise on 1,000 10km facilities?

>So I'd say megastructures should either be monuments or mostly incomprehensible.
I like this idea very much.

The only times I think megastructures make sense are for either super large scale resource extraction (building some kind of mega-space elevator to extract an entire planets worth of minerals, dyson spheres for solar energy catching) or yeah, to make giant fucking computers.

That said, giant planet sized balls of computronium are always a recurring thing in my sci-fi settings.

Sure, whatever numbers float your boat. I mean, nobody builds a 10km factory that's completely solid.

If you want to do resource extraction, there are plenty of minerals scattered around in smaller rocks.

Water-bearing planets are /super/ handy for concentrating soluble minerals, like copper. Without water action, copper would be astonishingly rare on Earth, but as it stands you can find nuggets of the stuff.

>Oh hey Zorthoplax, what're you up to down here?
>Not much. Just sent a rock tumbling through this debris disc here. Trying to pull the iron to a deeper orbit.
>No, I see that, but what's with the trajectories on this inner world? It's going to be a real mess.
>I'm trying out a new idea. Get a bunch of water on a world with active tectonics - real active - and then let them concentrate all the minerals.
>You're mad!
>Nah, see, look! It's already got an atmosphere and everything.
>And a moon. A big moon. That moon's too big.
>It'll be fiiiine. It'll help slosh the water around.
>Mental.
>See, look! You can see the calcium collecting. Copper too.
>What are those things?
>Ooh, I think that's life. Carbon-based, so it hasn't got a hope in hell, but still, good for it! Got to admire the spirit.
>Now they're bubbling. A lot. Is that suppose to happen?
>I'm sure it will be fine. Come one, let's get going. I'll stop back when the star's getting low on fuel to pick up my copper.

I've got a sci-fi setting in which there are ancient alien robots making planets uninhabitable and killing everyone on them. Everyone thinks they're a threat that could destroy all of known civilization, but in reality they're leftover space junk terraformers by a civilization much older than humanity. They're kinda like accidentally leaving a water hose running near an anthill.

>Deep meson sites.
I am aroused. I must steal this idea now.

Standard Von Neumann machines then. They're a bit of a hazard.

Of course, some enterprising civilizations end up hacking them and suddenly shooting several levels up the development tree... with predictably disastrous results in most cases.

How do I justify an al dente sci-fi setting not being ruled over by impossibly intelligent post-human self improving AIs while also having some amount of artificial intelligence?

Also, anyone got pictures of alien worlds?

This problem plagues me as well. I've taken to throwing everything I can at it.
War, tyranny, Faster-Than-Light drives and expansion, economic collapses, alien invasions, even a near-cure for aging.

You don't need to prevent it, just delay it long enough.

Close, except they don't self-replicate and can't even repair themselves. They can, and often are, destroyed before a total apocalypse, but their self-awareness makes hacking them difficult.

I have a few

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Space is big. Even Excession-class entities have plenty of room to roam around. A lot of sci-fi TV shows make "galactic war" a small affair of a few dozen or a few million worlds, when in reality there are 400 billion stars our galaxy, and most if not all of them have planets.

And what does "ruling" get you, anyway?

If you're a impossibly intelligent post-human self improving AI, your main competition is other impossibly intelligent post-human self improving AIs. You're locked in endless struggles with competing modes of existence, either absorbing/merging them or destroying them utterly.

Any primitive race you encounter that isn't immediately useful should be exterminated utterly, as they might produce IIP-HSIAIs of their own. They might also be concealed memetic weapons deployed by your many, many enemies, some of which are much more advanced than you are.

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So a bunch of drones dropped in to freely map the system and dropped out, with no word on counter measures to the recon, and this somehow addresses the cold rock with stuff inside it weapons? Never mind that anything smaller than Texas it could take decades of research to determine the exact mass and cause of that mass even if you had all the time in the world while standing on it.

In my setting, almost no one bothers with them. Its simply not worth the effort most of the time.

The only exception are the really weird starfish aliens, who build megastructures because they nave never once been able to find a planet that meets the same absurdly specific conditions of their home world, nor have they have replicated it by terraforming.

Its literally easier for them to build a megastructure that suits their needs than it is to make any planet other than their homeworld habitable for them. So they do that instead of colonizing worlds.

The impossibly intelligent AIs all reach a tipping point where they have predicted their own destruction within the next few billion years, but haven't been able to figure out how to avoid it yet. Solving that task takes priority over all other concerns, so they do nothing but gather the resources needed to build ever stronger, ever more powerful computers. None of which have provided a solution as of yet.

They are very old, vastly more intelligent than we can even imagine, and totally disconnected from anything we care about because they are tackling much bigger, more dire problems than are on our radar.

Anything with a power source will be significantly higher temperature than the space around it, user.

Temperature readings aren't hard, and if you can get a 720 reading of everything, it's going to be venting heat in at least ONE direction.

>alien races
I like them very distict from humanity. For example, a race of land-based ice-crabs and of jellyfish-like aquatic beings which only the females are sentient more interesting then "guy with funny shit in his face".
>ship interior/exteriors
Ships exteriors should be covered by ice to give protection against micrometeoroids, and lacking windows for structural integrity(albeit there are advanced monitors inside that give a vision of the outside through cameras). The interior is generally claustrofobic for efficiency reasons, albeit the passangers generally sleep during the jorney, having their minds put in virtual environment.
>crewman designs
There is no crewmen in conventional sense, rather, the ships are piloted by a single, generally self-aware AI that is supported by less potent, but more specialized ones (that may or may not be self-aware). Some of the self-aware support ones have physical bodies that they slip back to at the end of the trip (or if they quit/their contract expire).
>space weapons
Rapid-fire railguns, thermonuclear and antimatter missiles, and point-blank defense lasers are the conventional weaponry, and less conventional ones include weapons that fuck up space geometry, such as weapons that stretch space until intermolecular bonds stop existing, and the normal "colapse in a blackhole" types. Nanobots are not generally employed because they are very easy to counter and often have trouble surviving in very hostile environment of space.
>otherworldly monsters
Not monsters per se, but rather very weird lifeforms that could only have been created by a technologic advanced species, such bug-like things living in neutron stars that have nuclear fusion as part of their metabolism or massive, moon sized and bigger superships that go alround the galaxy, stoping only to collect resources from uninhabited and unclaimed solar systems.
>maps
Uses certain stars and signals from planets or "static" places as land marks.

>all ships powered by self-aware AI
>rapid fire EM weapons
I hope you're accounting for waste heat, because with computers that powerful and the energy requirements of firing a railgun at a rapid rate are going to generate a substantial amount of heat

You could use the ice in ship surface to help it cool down in a pinch, albeit most ships should have some sort of heat sink within itself.

BBEG escapes the party with relativistic FTL.

The BBEG lands at his secret hideout world after a few weeks of travels, but the party will be long dead as several thousand years have passed for the rest of the universe.

Messing with time dilation is like messing with time travel, except it only affects one person. Have fun with that!

This is coming from KSP experience, elliptical orbits seem to slow down as they approach apogee, even with time acceleration cranked up it always seems painfully slow at the top.

Even if it's still going fast enough to hurt, it's going to be easier to see and easier to avoid or deflect. An elliptical orbit slows down as it approaches apogee, and speeds up as it approaches perigee. Unless the apogee is much higher than the target, you will be intercepting at the slowest possible velocity for that orbit. And if your apogee is higher, than that means the orbit will take longer. The planet's size imposes a hard limit on how eccentric you can make it, the oval has to be wide enough to not get dragged through the planet's atmosphere.

But user, cooperation is a trait of higher lifeforms.

Isn't it also likely that super intelligent AIs might agree to not interfere with each other unless they see somebody who is violating this cosmic NAP?

>Rapid fire raillguns

Enjoy your melted rails and severely limited max projectile velocity.

Coilguns are what you are looking for.

>ice on the ship surface
That's not something that occurs unless you're building it into the crust of a comet or asteroid. Even then, you'd need some way of directly cooling the individual components, which would most likely mean using in-situ collection of ice, which in turn means more machinery generating more heat.

I'm not saying it's infeasible, but it's definitely a major problem with it. Even when the ship isn't firing, any ship capable of navigating in deep space without any human aid is going to need substantial processing power, which is the part of a computer that usually generates the most heat. You'd have to either put large heat radiators to prevent the components from overheating and failing, handwave it with some sort of CPU technology that generates little heat, or give it a small crew complement that can troubleshoot any issues and possibly take some of the calculation off of the computer's load.

Also, like said, the rails will need to be constantly replaced if they're firing constantly. Maybe look into a coilgun instead.

Almost forgot, another way you can reduce the heat waste is by having a ground control station do most of the work, similar to how it's done with modern space probes. However, then you run into issues like signal delay and losing contact with it as orbits put it out of the controller's line of sight. This can be mitigated some with communications relays, but that means that you also create easy targets for your enemy to attack.

This would be an interesting take on it, where the superintelligent AIs are incapable of taking over because they're essentially a galactic United Nations incapable of getting anything done.

Collecting ice could be done biomicrobots, while the CPU would just be a really big brain supplemented by nanobots.

You've misunderstood what makes "stealth" in space "impossible" then. The mere presence of a power source, especially one that is off, is not going to make something hot. An unmanned object that doesn't have to go anywhere can sit cold and wait forever. Cover it in some uneven rock so it's reflectivity and albedo are not suspicious and any incoming craft will likely be too close before the differences are noticeable.

Simple, strong AI are a fantasy. They come from the Asmiov stories which were written in the 1920s based on a misunderstanding of the concept of a turing complete computer. By the 1950s Asimov had thoroughly understood the limits of a turing complete computer and his story of the time contained no AI at all.

Fast forward to the present time and as much as we like to beleive computers are magic, have souls, and that we are computers too and can be uploaded... we actually reached the end of Moore's law a little bit ago and it doesn't get better for computers from here, just a little more time as the best stuff slowly reaches consumers. Follow this up with a revolution where we have to demand microsoft STOP eating up our computers' runtimes on pointless shit so they can better run the programs we want, and you'll start to see Strong AI are a pipedream when the most advanced computers have to fight with a graphics presentation for computational power.

That's how you justify the lack of strong AI. The fact that they are not real. By actually understanding how computers work and why and understanding why Strong AI are not real. Strong AI is a myth, and computers are not capable of anything.

>By the 1950s Asimov had thoroughly understood the limits of a turing complete computer and his story of the time contained no AI at all

>1956
>The Last Question published
>"Let there be light."

This nigga is right, you can't brute force self-awareness through coding. Self-envolving hardware is where the future is at.

youtube.com/watch?v=Z1roP52Py7s

SPAAAAAAAAAAAAACE

I'm the best at space.

Cool space thread, I think I'll bump it

How do you like your astro-mecha, guise?

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tri-walker get wills it

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