[ARC] Large and Heavily Damaged Drifter Fleet Encountered in Hive Complex

Fiction Portal Intergalactic Summit
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How about ‘any’? Have some damned patience. I know observation over time doesn’t result in flashy headlines and things you can brag about, but patience would still be key. When these fleets are being entirely harmless (and yes, a few capsuleers moronically losing ships by aggressing or hauling around corpses still count as harmless) that is the time to simply sit back, relax, watch them and do nothing. Watch. See what their end-goal is. How is their patience? Perhaps you’ll even get to see them actually find whatever it is they’re looking for and see how they react to that. Maybe you can track them to wherever they came from or where they’re going next.

You keep mentioning those few weeks spent observing them in the past. I know someone who spent that long in a bloody snowdrift, just waiting for a momentary glimpse of an animal, recording it briefly and then going back home again very happy with the result. (Disclaimer, not literally laying in a snowdrift that long. They made a suitable little habitat and used remote surveillance and so on of course. Point about patience is still key here.)

I keep wondering what you guys feel you gain by killing those fleets on those gates. All you get, for all intents and purposes, is some crap loot. There’s no intel to be gained, there’s no new knowledge, and sitting still in Coercers exercising suicide gank tactics isn’t exactly something you gain any kind of piloting capability from. What is worth losing the opportunity to observe and potentially gain new information? What exactly is worth those lives thrown away at this ‘suicide gank’ event?

Doesn’t seem very random to me. From what I can tell, they kill over Entosis tech, corpses and in self-defense. We kill vastly greater numbers of traders, haulers and combat pilots alike all over New Eden in the span of five minutes, compared to what the Drifters manage through however long they spend scanning at the gates.

How about when they pose an actual credible threat to our nations? I mean, theoretically they’re capable of hitting very hard, as Jammies showed, and yet they demonstrably don’t do that anymore. They have clearly achieved what they wanted with those hits, and now show themselves content scanning gates and defending their toeholds.

Other capsuleers, baseliner pirates and hostile navies all pose vastly greater threats to our respective nations and demonstrably do vastly greater damage. Why aren’t you guys rushing CODE or Miniluv? Or Nancydotte/PL etc out in Providence and Amarr lowsec? Why aren’t you fighting off the various Navies conducting raids in our various nations? These things do - without even the slightest doubt - far more damage to baseliner and capsuleer assets than Drifters have done in their entire known co-existence with us. In every sec rated system, and some even in w-space.

You want me to consider the Drifters a credible threat? Well, when you show me that they’re doing anywhere near as much damage as we are already doing to each other, I’ll start considering adding them to the very long list of real and demonstrable threats to my people. Until then, there’s far worse preying upon them than these Drifters.

By now, you lot have killed more baseliners in your Coercer wrecks than the Drifters have.

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All the organizations you listed are made up if other humans who are simply participating in the great cycle of our species. We’ve killed one another since the day air filled our ancestors’ lungs. Yet humanity continues on and in fact - thrived. The strong have survived tragedies of the past and carried on to usher in the next generation.

Our violence is apart of a greater cycle in the Maker’s universe that shapes us. The Drifters have no place here, they’re not human. They do not contribute to the cycle, only threaten it.

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Exactly what makes the Drifters less human than us capsuleers?

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Capsuleers are humans whatever you want to cry about them killing people or not

Unlike Drifters, Capsuleers have many traits that reinforce their humanity.

Emotion
Passion
Individuality
Personality
Natural sentience
Ambition
Culture
Desire

These Drifters have nothing like this…They were created in some dark laboratory while us humans were naturally born into this world. We were tailored to be apart of this chaotic universe and tame it. To leave our mark on the Maker’s masterpiece.

I’m a Capsuleer because I earned this privilege. My desire to utilize my powers for battle doesn’t make me any less human. My genetics are as human as they come. The implant in the back of my neck doesn’t change that.

These Drifters…Are nothing like us

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I know capsuleers are human, that’s my point. Now, demonstrate to me if you don’t mind, how the Drifters lack Emotion, Passion, Individuality, etc etc. That’s a pretty hefty claim and will require pretty hefty backing up if you want it to be taken seriously. Of course, that you then claim they were ‘made in a dark laboratory’ kind of makes me doubt you can.

These Drifters, seems to me to be quite like us. They seem to be infomorphs piloting meat puppets, just like us. They camp gates like we do. Respond violently to threats like we do. Of course, they do seem to kill each other quite a bit less than we do, so there’s always that.

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A lot, actually. Most everything about them has been changed to be synthetic, according to the publicly released Drifter Autopsy. Most of that is unimportant for the subject of this conversation, but some of it is relevant.

For one, the fact that they have purposefully modified their bodies to prevent communication. They have metallic structures across the jawline that quite literally prevent the mouth from opening. Moreover, they lack vocal cords. There is no physical capability of verbal communication, which means that the only remaining options are visual gesture, alphanumeric, etc.

“While being complete inference based on what we see with the corpse, the lack of vocal cords is an interesting find and strongly suggests that the drifters are being controlled by another entity that doesn’t want them to speak.”

Second, despite radical and extensive changes their physiology, they made no effort what-so-ever to modify the auditory senses. In fact, they show a low significance in the modifications and augmentations shown in the Drifter body.

“The vision and the proprioception appears to have been augmented. The hearing sense, however, has not been modified suggesting a low significance of the hearing sense”

It is arguably easier to communicate with a Rogue Drone than it is to communicate with a Drifter. In fact, there has been evidence that Rogue Drones at least have a communication structure that we can interact and engage in - though it rarely works.

It would be different if the Drifters had explicitly made an effort to provide themselves a means of socialization, but instead they opted for the opposite. In order to perform their modifications and augmentations, they outright eliminated the ability to communicate to do so.

“Perhaps more viable as an explanation is that the implantation process for therest of the subject’s head was greatly simplified by severe damage to (or total removal of) the mandible. Such would notably ease access to deeper structures in the brain and go a good way towards accounting for the consistency of these implants across all observed Drifters.”

In addition, the Frontal Lobe (necessary for higher thought processes such as communication) is largely unmodified by comparison to the rest of the brain. What modifications were made even go so far as to suggest that it is being used as a ‘router’ of sorts for other neural processes. Thus, they excluded it in whatever they felt was priority for the brain to be used for.

“The frontal lobe is associated with such things as planning, motivation, attention, etc. This section’s augmentations are light in comparison to the remaining, heavily altered parts of the brain. These fibers must play a role in information processing and retrieval. But why use this instead of standard paths?”

For these reasons, and the utter lack of demonstrable effort on their behalf to communicate, we assume that they are either incapable or unwilling to do so. Yet we still try. Perhaps not to the utopian, pacifistic degree that would be asked of us, but we still make every attempt that we can on a routine basis. Prior to each operation we run a checklist of attempts to communicate - as Makoto mentioned.

And yet, even despite these attempts we’re met with both controversy and criticism. We’re vilified for doing anything at all, and I’m certain that even if we did set aside weapons and simply did not engage Drifters at all, we would still be subject to that same treatment. Thus, if we’re going to play the antagonist in everyone else’s play, regardless of our actions, we might as well just wear that on our sleeves. At least then we can say that we did something, and that’s more than our critics would seem to do, with few exceptions.

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While interesting, this hardly limits communication for an infomorph. I don’t use neither my mouth nor my ears while I’m doing most of my communication these days. Meatspace would easily rate as the least effective place for communication, flapping facemeat at each other rather than communicate at the speed of thought.

That they are unwilling to do so is another thing entirely, and I would agree with that. However, when your attempts to do so are inevitably followed up with mindless violence I would probably not bother responding either. I’m mostly amazed they bother waiting until you fire first, at this point.

You’re met with criticism because your attempts are token at best, and because you pretend that them not being interested in jabbering with you is sufficient cause to then run straight to the other side of the spectrum, breaking out the guns without even considering pausing somewhere near the middle of it.

You can play the oh so poor victim of criticism all you want. It’s not going to go away when none of you address those criticisms. Trying to paint what people are advocating here as utopian pacifism (spirits below, I’m getting flashbacks to the other IGS where I was called an “SoE toting pacifist”. It was as mindboggling then as this is now.) when it’s a simple call for restraint and information gathering at a point in time where none of us, you included, know feck all about them, their objectives, their means, their motives and what the consequences of rash violent action may be… well, that’s just another bit of disingenuous misdirection that adds to the pile of reasons trust is eroding.

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In the face of overwhelming evidence that have convinced many, you objectively move the goal post farther back. It is abundantly clear you will never change your position, have no interest in doing so, and for that reason I will no longer waste my time. My only regret is that I tried one last time when I thought I saw a glimmer of hope that you would be reasonable; that I may convince you with what many others see. I fell into that trap.

No longer.

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Your standards for “overwhelming evidence” seem to be rather… non-existent. What you have is some minor conjecture and assumptions, while disregarding that all of these things are pretty irrelevant for an infomorph’s meat puppet. The goalposts remain exactly where they’ve always been. Finding information that isn’t guesswork and conjecture would be a start.

Addressing the quite long list of other issues raised so far would probably be helpful too.

tl;dr, your desperate desire for this to be what you want it to be is shining brightly.

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On the subject of ship crews, I’d just like to point out that the Takmahl Mass Cloning Device solves the issues of unavoidable casualties amongst essential crew on “suicide attacks”.
The cloned crew can be made from algae soup, so, while they might not survive your operations, you don’t actually have to care either.

We now return you to your scheduled programming: “The Arrendis & Mizhara Minmatar Argument Comedy Show”

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Mirroring. Which, at this point, means non-aggression. Sustained non-aggression. Demonstrate to them that the rabid wombat maybe isn’t rabid after all. Demonstrate that you can exist in the same space, fly right past them, without attacking.

Don’t do it once. Don’t do it for ‘weeks’. Do it consistently. Do it until they shoot first. If there were a slaver hound that had repeatedly attacked and savaged you, you wouldn’t suddenly trust it because you walked past once and it didn’t attack. And that slaver hound is you right now.

They change behavior. You ‘run a gamut of tests’… and then attack. Have you tried being passive since this new behavior started? I don’t just mean ‘don’t attack them with weapons’, I mean ‘don’t bombard their ships with directed energy flows because hey, maybe they’re mistaking your scans for just really pathetic weapons’. Are you getting target locks on them? Because that’s an aggressive act that would get me instantly wary and mistrustful of any capsuleer I don’t already know (and many that I do).

You want them to talk to you, that may well take time at this point, a long, tense, difficult period where as long as they don’t shoot, you don’t shoot. If they open fire, you respond, but only if they initiate hostilities. How long would it take you to trust that slaver hound?

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No, it’s not. I’m currently communicating with you, right? I’m not moving my mouth, I’m not moving my fingers. I’m in a pod, transmitting my thoughts. Every Drifter pilot we’ve ever encountered has been in their ship, wired in. So they have electronic prosthetics to use for communication. Faster, more efficient, and more accurate communication, no less. If we set aside language and CONCORD’s laws, we could attempt direct interface with one another through the pod systems, and communicate by unfiltered concept. There’s no reason to imagine they don’t already.

(If that’s the case, then it also raises an interesting question: If you left language behind a few thousand years ago and existed as an infomorph, communicating in pure concept… how well would you be able to understand someone using language at you? Maybe that’s why they had to puppet Tukoss? Maybe they had to filter concepts through his wetware and let his mind provide the language? Because our efforts to communicate with them are, in effect, the barking of hounds and braying of asses… or the unintelligible babbling of an infant, prone to lashing out in anger?)

Edit; BTW, re: the Frontal Lobe. Maybe in a culture that’s existed in an infomorph state for a few millennia, the reason they haven’t ‘augmented’ the frontal lobe is because as infomorphs, that’s where they feel the core of ‘identity’ resides—in the higher thought processes, as you put it—and it’s not that they’ve neglected it, but rather that they’ve left it unadultered.

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As much as I dislike you, I will admit you raise some interesting questions. I do not know the answers, though. I will not pretend that I do. All I can say is that, in my eyes, there is more evidence to suggest that they are unwilling to communicate than there is to suggest that they are. The issue is that if they were passive, and had any desire for a diplomatic endeavor, I believe we would have seen it by now. We would have seen an attempt. By now they would know that we have the ability to communicate at all, and they would make the effort to engage via those methods in the knowledge that they have failed with theirs. Instead, they arrived in force, assassinated a world-leader and did incredible damage to that nation’s infrastructure.

All that I do know is that taking a passive approach is a gamble I do not want to lose, and if the destruction of Drifters means limiting their potential impact on the world, then so be it. Thinning their military strength is a better alternative than allowing them to build. The consequences for such seem much less dire than rolling the dice and hoping that they are at all diplomatic.

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But again, consider that vicious, aggressive slaver hound that mauls you every time you see it, unprovoked. The first time you knew of it was when it forced its way into your home and attacked… maybe not you, but your belongings, your servants, your pets?

Would you be eager to talk to it, or would you just pick up a stick to keep it away, the next time it showed up? After a hundred such attacks? A thousand? A hundred thousand?

We know they have the ability to communicate. They did communicate with us, through the body of Hillen Tukoss. That’s not speculation based on an autopsy, we know this happened. It’s an established fact.

You say taking a passive approach is a gamble you don’t want to lose. For years now, we’ve been taking an aggressive approach. Has it gotten us anywhere? Has it made any progress? You can tout ‘thinning their military strength’, but you know… take all the Drifter kills the entire Cluster has scored. You’ll get… what? A few thousand, maybe?

If that was us… if Goonswarm had to replace 3,000… I dunno, Typhoons… I don’t think it’d take a week. The same’s true of NC/PL, Guardians, MC… Whatever effect you’re having on their military strength, it’s fleeting, at best. We don’t even know where their actual production facilities are, or just what kind of scale they’re capable of producing at. But they certainly don’t seem to have any problem losing 50-100 ships in a day and continuing their operations as if absolutely nothing had happened. I think the evidence is pretty good that whatever ‘thinning’ you’re doing… it’s not slowing down their optempo. It’s not hindering them whatsoever.

We’ve seen what they can do with just 100 ships. We know they’ve been building for years and we know that 2 years ago, we saw an armada in space in the Tukoss footage that far outstrips anything we’ve seen them field. If they wanted to burn us down… they could have. They could’ve dropped 20 times as many battleships in Safizon and begun a full-scale extermination of the system.

So… ask yourself: if the choices are ‘take a chance and demonstrate that we can be peaceful and non-threatening’ or ‘keep on pissing off the armada that’s still out there someplace until it just starts erasing worlds’… which of those is the more dire consequence?

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I do not know the current political landscape, so I will use an old one. It is a hastily generated analogy, so do try to read between the lines.

If Goonswarm and Band of Brothers had their war as long as they did and Band of Brothers suddenly stopped firing on Goonswarm one day in the hopes that a peaceful resolution could be made, what would stop Goonswarm from overtaking them on a whim? What encourages Goonswarm to pursue a peaceful route when their enemy essentially gives them the keys to the house? Would they even be willing to set aside those differences that late in the war?

Sure, it is absolutely possible that Goonswarm would have been willing to enter into peace-talks. It is absolutely possible that they could have come to a resolution over their grievances. It is just as possible that Band of Brothers could roll over and die, still clinging to the hope that maybe if they wait just one more day, Goonswarm will enter into negotiations.

Alternatively, they fight, knowing that there is the potential for losing that war, but still trying to win it anyway. Because they realize that fighting and hoping for a victory is far different than simply sitting by, letting the enemy consolidate and then utterly destroying them. Has taking an aggressive approach gotten us anywhere? Debatable - argumentative, even. But simply doing nothing is a far worse outcome when your enemy has the potential to destroy entire nations as it is.

I have been fired upon by my own friends when my corporation leader left our alliance, unannounced. I have lost ships and crew to those saw an attack of opportunity and took it without hesitation, despite being in the same fleet with me mere days before. If the argument is that the Drifters are ‘human’ or would show human qualities, why should I trust that Drifters would be any different than those who betrayed me? Why should I give them that opportunity?

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The thing that gets me the most is that the Drifters seem to be capable of far more than they’re currently showcasing. They posses the resources, numbers, and strategic capabilities necessary to launch constellation-wide invasions, incursions we have yet to understand the motive behind - something I’d certainly like the Amarr Navy to illuminate, if possible - and yet they’ve done nothing since their inexplicable ending of forward operations.

Whatever their goals, the Drifters seem to be watching and waiting for something - they continue to pick away at the Jove Observatories to pillage their vast stores of the Antikythera element, and continue to passively investigate anything that approaches them when not near the Observatories and Wormholes they’ve laid claim to.

The Drifters seem capable of taking an entire empire apart if they so wished to, but after their very prominent headshot of the Empress, whether in revenge for the Amarr’s specific plundering of their home space or for other reasons, they invaded en masse only to stop again without rhyme or reason for doing so.

What is their plan? What are they waiting for? And what’s causing them such harm as to have hundreds of catastrophically damaged vessels pour into the Main Cluster as they are?

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The rest of your post is pretty good and I would indeed like to hear from the Empire what exactly they did to piss off the Drifters and provoke that kind of response. It would seem that the Marys have done something to bring this upon us and this question has never been answered. However, what might be causing them such harm… well…

… this doesn’t necessarily worry me much at all. Whatever it is, it failed to kill quite a lot of Drifters, and I’ve seen failed bombing runs leave more ships in worse condition and still lose the fight quite handily. I am more curious as to why they don’t repair the damage.

To me, it indicates a certain amount of disposability. “Eh, why repair? Keep sending them out to work until they explode. We’ve got plenty.” kind of attitude.

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There is no evidence at all to support my theory on that, but… here it goes.

Perhaps the Drifters were intent on establishing a foothold in K-Space and made their move against the Amarr to great success. The only foreseeable reason that I can determine their lack of a concise effort to utterly destroy us is that they are building forces for a different reason. You collect materials to build your war machine, but you only do not field it when it is being reserved for an explicit purpose. That may be an assault on humanity that we have not seen the likes of since the initial Sansha incursions; perhaps worse.

Or that could mean that the board has changed, and they are reserving it for a different matter. We do not know what lies in the deepest recesses of this galaxy. A decade ago, we did not even consider Anoikis to exist. Half a decade ago, we did not even consider the Drifters to exist. Perhaps now, we do not consider that something else is out there that has gained the Drifters’ attention. It was not that long ago that we discovered that Sansha and the Sleepers had a confrontation.

Perhaps the Drifters stumbled upon something that has taken a higher priority than us.

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Your analogy, hastily formed as it is, is flawed on a couple of levels.

  1. We knew what BoB wanted. They told us. They knew what we wanted, too. We understood one another pretty well. That is not the case here.
  2. We knew where their facilities and backfield were. You know nothing about where the Drifters’ ships are being fabricated, where their command and control structure is, what that structure even looks like, or literally anything beyond ‘look, they hang around the things we’ve labelled ‘hives’ but we don’t know why’. There’s a lot of speculation, but no testable hypotheses, no understood facts.

Moreover, though: They already have stopped shooting, unless you attack them. They’ve given you no keys. You don’t possess the means to destroy any of their infrastructure. More capsuleer capital ships have died than Drifters, in the same time period, and we’re pretty much still awash with those here in New Eden. There’s no reasonable evidence that the combined efforts of all of New Eden’s capsuleers to date have made an appreciable dent in the number of Drifter battleships we know existed two years ago. That means you don’t have the keys to the house. You’ve got the keys to the mailbox, out on the curb, and you’re gleefully imagining that the few flyers inside is the owner’s prized library.

You’ve been trying violence. Violence hasn’t gotten you anywhere. You’ve made literally no progress in years. Now their behavior gives an opportunity to demonstrate that you’re more than mindless attack drones. If this continues for ten years, and you kill every one of them that you find, you still will not have made any kind of measurable dent in their numbers.

So you can keep shooting them, knowing that at best your efforts are being ignored, and at worst, you’re convincing them that maybe it’s time to unless a hundred thousand battleships at a time to cleanse the cluster of the blight that is humanity. Or you can take a chance, knowing that at worst, you’ll start shooting one another again later, and at best… who knows?

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It’s true, we’ve never actually seen Drifter vessels perform any sort of repair routines - maybe it’s in fact impossible for them to do so, owing to their main weapon in some way? Perhaps these fleets are returning from completely dispatching whatever damaged them? So many options…

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