Some SoL #11

Mordekai Aberhoff

Expansive Psionics:

In trying to market to Shetou you manage to increase sales though you don’t have market dominance among them. There are two other psionics based companies among the Shetou run by some old school illithids who are also quite good at managing psionic sales. Though less so then stealth based products and adrenals one specializes more in tattoos and another in crystal based. Though at the high prices you are going for these competing products that have been around for awhile just go a bit cheaper then you do to maintain the Shetou market presence easily. This most notably effects sales to Sharen and Jaal’Darya as they have long established business with the illithid companies.

Profits take a bit of a hit from sheltering the employees.

Recruiting people who burn out their brains doesn’t go well. Making people sign up to use a weapon that kills the user is pretty hard, and you aren’t exactly inspiring patriotic sacrifice like 314-C does. In the attempt we find that most people who want to fight aliens to that level of commitment just sign up for military duty, particularly Selona and Valdir since those two “won” against the aliens. Though Selona isn’t accepting most people who try to join so Valdir for the most part.

Raw material buying is pretty easy, especially with the Madhammer strategy. Ruined factories are also easily acquired to replace the ones you lost as well as gain even more then you started from. Staffing is easy on the labor part of things, finding other professional psions to run the factories is a bit harder overall though.

Now you own a spiked bottled water company, thats a good market.

Stoogie manages to develop sahad avatar abilities after all that effort on the project. However, all that effort still just made him one and not the chosen one. Giza and Cerys for example are still much stronger Sahad practitioners.

Aerovent Filters:

On the upside one big outlet for all the filter production is Serrano’s Atlantis project alongside the other plan to trade it for labor. Though one potential problem is that it can’t last long since the filters take so long to go bad, so its not like the people you traded them to are going to need another for awhile.

Buying out facilities seems repetitive since you specified pharmaceuticals, so thats the same as the people above. Same result either way. Though yes Fuel processing plants are ridiculously well guarded right now, along with agriculturally useful areas.

The Cult:

Zex is still by technicality just doing his own thing, even if it is beneficial to the cult. While this is doing well to show his competence it also shows his potentially problematic independence, as he does know the real trick of the cult after all. Lately he assembled the cult’s main conspirating psions to himself to take stock of who is still around and redeploy them tow here you wanted. Though despite the nature of the cult it doesn’t work so well to get into position the growing warlords around the system, since the warlords don’t know what the cult can actually do for them and just see the yoga cult as that. Elves don’t put much stock in such things for warfare. The cult remains more of a hobbyist and relaxing thing in appearance to people looking for inner peace, it doesn’t quite have zealots.

In other developments, Zex is revamping the cult from the inside without supervision. Despite the efforts to force Stoogie to become a sahad avatar, Zex shot past them on his own and developed Sahad abilities during the invasion and has been utilizing it to do something sneaky. Using the cult meditations and psionic links through his sahad visions to make people believe the cult really has been achieving something weird as hell to further its credibility as more then a meditation hobby to the newer visitors. He has also independently began experimenting with combining it with his access to a vast number of psions to see if he can make interesting stuff happen.

Mhaldaru Foods:
They barely manage to take over a couple of farms at all, in the current state things are in attempting to use force just doesn’t work for them since other people who want control of the farms are also willing to use force and Madhammer is a bit too busy with everything else its been asked to do, leaving it unable to really contend with Alnae warlords and Shetou Generals in a war over farms.

Lumber Company:

Increases staff is easy as physical labor doesn’t have many specific requirements.

You build a seed bank.

You build new farms with some chickens and goats being their primary specialty.

Targeting the Alnae warlords proves to be the most difficult undertaking on the whole list in quite some time. One attempt is successful, one is aborted, and another attempt backfired massively. The successful attempt overtook one of the smaller warlords vying for control of Luna being propped up by the wealthy that lived there. The backfired one walked into a thing.

Legally speaking it would be a Kenin sandwich with Aryn’s brain but it would not please anyone’s sense of taste.

Edric Vandross

The super carrier heads to dock at a Solvang station out in the middle of nowhere to resume work. Though this has a potential downside in that a bunch of pirates now know about it and may want to hijack it as it nears completion, consider buffing up security.

Hadiya is pretty good at agriculture and creating food at least. Its technically the same job she was hired for, just now she’s terraforming her homeworld instead of alien planets.

The raiders are pretty successful as salvage hunters since most of the scavenging going on is not on military scale so the raiders can contest any other scavengers they come across. They’re mostly looking for FTL equipment as asked, though they sometimes have a hard time telling whats what on the alien ships and knowing what actually has value.

Red pilling Raymond results in him going “Oh gee, I never would have guessed. Nothing about my employment was ever suspicious at all, you are soooo stealthy” in a flat monotone. Though he can’t help with Aryn, her cybernetics are too advanced and none of your crew in the entirety of the gauntlet’s holdings have ever seen anything like them.

Sethis Tyne

Reika just informs you that a paladin order is not happening. The complications are numerous. First off she doesn’t consider herself a paladin since she doesn’t work in service to a god, regardless of the concept that Vanjin and Auni came up with since Reika has paladin-like powers. Second, it would require people to become pandem wielders and that is already a tricky sell. The third problem is it would need the cooperation of powerful celestial beings, and they typically don’t do that ever since you guys came over and conducted a genocide on the celestial plane during the era of the purge. Reika is unique in that she has such a bind because she was a child twisted to their plans and made into their weapon, and hers won’t even talk to her anymore. Most pandem casters are not going to be able to convince a celestial being to bind with them. However, as a silver lining, she does know where to find other people like herself. As rare as they are, since she was a child that lived with the celestials she had contact with the few people who had a pandem bind with the celestials when they came to visit the plane. Though people with talents that rare don’t tend to struggle to find work so they aren’t terribly recruitable. Notably of the twelve people she lists, one of them is in Valdir and their bind has been behaving strangely ever since their rise to power. Also of interest, among the twelve paladins are two extraordinarily powerful characters contesting each other for rank number one. Titus is an assassin created by the celestials like Reika and was her mentor. The other one, Haziel, is actually an aasimir who never bound to an actual entity but instead to the plane itself. While Haziel should be the weakest because of that, she spent all her xp on other character feats that make her pretty strong since her low corruption tier means she can still use advanced technology. Titus currently works only for the celestials as their dedicated assassin, Haziel works for Siwa Technologies.

Kala once again begins the process of hunting for high rolls to find a dragon hero that can be recruited.

That damned stealth drive is still on hiatus, also Vandross only rented the dockspace for his super carrier work, so the stealth drive is just sitting in the garage collecting dust without a lab to be worked on further.

The push for the black market scene is pretty smooth given that Sophia’s team is still holding together, had the foresight to protect as much of their merchandise as they could, but also now knows who they work with and thus have access to the assistance of people like Leon and Auni to keep competition low. Though the sale of some products are particularly good right now, getting more of them is going to be an issue soon with how fast they’re selling. No one in the Gauntlet actually owns production facilities for the things Sophia sells, so she is having to look if there are any out there she can act as the middle man for. The only major weapons producer that is selling to the black market right now is Selona, though that shit sells well. However, drug production is the one that is tricky to secure suppliers for.

Interrogating Aryn proves it to be a complicated situation. She can’t transmit internally, at least not consciously, but her APT is still technically a cell phone in the first place. Though it does lend evidence to the earlier pointed out factor that cyborgs don’t have hardware to transmit or receive messages the traditional way as to protect them from hackers like Aryn. As far as we can figure out, she knows literally nothing about her cyborg nature or her creator. That triggers the problem, we don’t have the technical know-how required to fix her. Her cybernetics are massively more advanced then what is typical, they aren’t necessarily more powerful by such a wide margin but they’re more adaptable, durable, and most importantly: undetectable. No metal detector, x-ray machine, or anything that should send up flags ever noticed she was a robot.  We’re not even sure what material she is made out of. So she needs to find someone who can fix her hand, and that means going to find Kenin or Arkaric. She wants to meet them anyways since they might be able to contextualize her existence. Problematically though, Kenin is with the mothership and Indal off doing other stuff at another star which could leave her gone for a very long time just due to travel. The more accessible option is Arkaric, but its Arkaric.

Luci Serrano

Actually finding an ocean planet turns out to be very easy, besides the one’s already in the Sol System, astronomers already knew where to find some. They just weren’t on the top priority for other colonizers because oceans seem less beneficial to live on. So the survey guys you had go take a look. Of the ones the survey teams check out two stand out. One is just a bunch of inhospitable water due to other chemicals present in it, so its pretty empty and quiet. Another has an existing ecosystem underwater, but its a big and advanced ecosystem, that means big fish with big teeth. It also has some islands scattered around so its not all water, and there is wildlife on those islands. Its 95% water so close enough. However, the presence of that ecosystem means there are a lot more resources of value there particularly food and materials with mana based properties (fuel). Though colonizing it could be riskier and more expensive, like a lot riskier. The DM has been playing subnautica a lot recently and certainly has a lot of ideas about big alien fish that make survival difficult.

Tech team pulls up some blueprints off google, communicating across stars is harder then water when magic is involved. Notably because magic struggles at long ranges a lot more so then through specific materials. So that is taken care of.

The materials needed to set up the underwater city are actually very easy for your mining company to gather, because its stone. While stone has the problem of being heavy its just going to sit in one spot underwater, and special kinds of stone materials can be made via magic refining that are ideal for such construction projects. Expensive obviously but definitely cheaper then the metals used for ship hulls.

By far the best orbital defenses are cannons placed on the ground due to the ease of maintenance when not being fired and large area they can cover when they’re intended to work at those ranges. Also, when the cannon is on the ground its pretty easy to make them really big. If expense and maintenance weren’t a consideration, ships are the most effective as they’re adaptable and carry a crew for rapid deployment due to the distance between them and the enemy. Though the cost of  one battleship is worth dozens orbital defense cannons and will only have one gun of equivalent power to the orbital cannon. So in summary cannons are the most efficient, ships are the best. It should be noted that it is typical invasion protocol to deploy ground forces to go after orbital cannons and shields as step 1, which is another reason why fleets can be important as they’re really good at intercepting those attempts.

Phantoms of the Purge part 2

Mordekai Aberhoff

Lately the sahad research team has been mostly finding details on how to wield it more efficiently rather then new spells as well as the research on the avatars. Philosophy students seem to be very hit or miss, a lot of them are very self important and are kind of hipsters so the epiphany transformation isn’t as common as one might expect. However, after some discussion with Cerys and others who were at the thousand legends Asi has performed some shady experiments with promising results. The emotional state of someone can be temporarily altered to cause the acceptance of sahad to be more likely, this is why so many appeared during the battle with the alien mothership. It turns out being put in the middle of a war causes people to become a lot more mentally inclined towards sahad’s grand truths. When subjected to enough stress humanoids become more likely to reach the desired results. So basically Asi has been mildly torturing people to turn them into avatars, things along the lines of sleep deprivation not pulling teeth. Asi finds that trying to refine the technique of acquiring people of correct disposition can be bypassed with his methods to some extent. It does turn out that longer lived races seem to be better at this then shorter lived ones according to his findings but more data is required to say so definitively.

The expansions to the facility come in good timing since Asi has been doing slightly crazier experiments lately and the extra space is useful for his vast array of wild shots in the dark.

And that is the truth behind the kenin sandwich, for it lives within all of us.

Besides mhaldaru there are  a few other companies that produce stockpileable food though they’re fairly well established so the necessary money for investment to make decisions on their behalf could be quite high as in the tens of millions.

The psionic field test still hasn’t seem to caused specialists to show up as far as we can tell, though there is always the possibility they are there and we just don’t know about it as it might be a COA division that operates covertly as their initials imply.

I’m not making characters the day before the update, remind me to do bodyguard cards for next week.

Edric Vandross

ETA for supercarrier is approximately 8 months now

Unsurprisingly D&D’s equivalent to cows sheep and chickens is cows sheep and chicken. There weren’t many fantasy farm animals in the monster manual when Arcanist got started up.

As a correction, the elemental plane is singular its just all the elements in there are extremist. So less so then a water plane there is just an elemental plane with a lot of water stuff going on in it.

Utilizing the stealth drive design Raymond has come up with so far will require the entire ship to be turned off to utilize it. Though it can technically still be used, just don’t plan on moving at the same time. Good for camping though.

Planet surveying is underway, though could take awhile as the galaxy is a big place. While there are some leads based on astronomers gazing at the stars for awhile now, they still need to be visited by a survey team to say officially whether or not “yeah this is habitable”

While their surveying you should clear up “less then average terraforming”. Planet scale terraforming is definitely a challenge to undertake and costs a vast amount of resources, however you could technically do the bubble dome strategy with some arcane shields (like Tykel, that planet is inhospitable there’s just this one city that did local terraforming instead of planetary). The bubble strategy is obviously less then 1% the cost and effort then a planetary attempt as its really just plopping a space station down on the ground. I mean you could just literally land the carrier on some spot and say “yep this’ll do” depending on gravity.

Your shopping list for Kala is more of a Johnson cult job as thats just mass recruiting.

Since you’re going to ask when this takes forever as well, the ETA on the dreadnoughts and carrier is about a year and a half.

Terraforming 101:
Planet scale terraforming is primarily based on arcane and pandem magic and huge ritual style spells that often involve runes being drawn in the planet as wide as 10 kilometers in diameter. It also requires massive amounts of mana to perform. The preferred method is to utilize generators that can be left by the runes for awhile to charge it over time as the total output will be higher over time for the space/weight of the objects that had to be moved here. There is also a bit of prep work in the form of introducing some of the key components of the terraforming around the rune so it has a blueprint to spread. The first phase upon casting the spell is to just spread the baseline conditions as far as possible, if it doesn’t spread far enough the whole thing could be pointless as the hostile environment will start murdering the terraformed stuff or the atmosphere might not have finished changing and remain inhospitable. After that is all taken care of Pandem Casters known as “druids” start seeding stuff all over the place. These casters are experts in ecological relationships so they work to make a stable enough environment.  Pandem experts are also utilized to adjust the planet’s gravity, this is actually the easiest of all the things to do, so when looking to terraform something usually gravity is not much of a concern. There is an exception though, if a planet is too large and its gravity needs to be lowered by too much then suddenly the planet could just say “fuck it” and lose its atmosphere to space. That can also be corrected but makes the gravity alteration process suddenly the hard part instead of the easy part. Once you’ve gotten all this baseline stuff down, atmosphere correction is harder then generation. You can add an atmosphere easier then you can transform it. In the addition of an atmosphere, just use a planetary shield and invert it to forcefully hold gases inside and let the terraformed trees do their thing for a little while. In the case of transforming an existing one, get some crazy alchemists to analyze the exact chemistry that needs to be done.  In the case of the latter, have the alchemists check it out before you do anything else, because the reactions they might need to kick off could be highly destructive to every other stage of the process.

Dome style terraforming is just build a space station, but use a shield bubble instead of a giant hull and construct remembering gravity is a thing. Done. Just don’t walk outside the bubble.

Luci Serrano

You buy 100 garages and 200 dudes for an electronics company, then upgrade it to actual offices.

Oh and raw materials processing teams as well.

Lush and Angel seem to be doing well, though Angel in particular has been ridiculously profitable due to her total cheat of how she gains popularity. They’re both on tour as usual, they’re young and new stars so they haven’t gotten tired of all the traveling yet.

Lara has everything pretty easily as she’s mostly a solo act and had her own supplies given her previous line of work. Lately she just follows you around looking professional when you’re in meetings with other people and lounges around whatever she can find to sit on otherwise. Its a cushy gig for how much you’re paying her and how rarely you’re attacked.

The movie and TV department is doing well, profits have increased though its mostly just stable without any major developments there.

Exme is sitting around investigating random stories as they come across her desk since her last project is kind of sitting around in a dead end at the moment.