Report on POCHVEN's "Stellar Fleet Deployment Site

Fiction Portal Intergalactic Summit
21

Without disagreeing completely, Ms. Jouhinen, you wouldn’t be saying either of those things if you’d seen much of Pochven or the Abyss. Both entities are very active; we just aren’t their priority. Their priority in Pochven seems to be basically yours, only I doubt if they seize control of the Pochven loop that they’ll be returning it to its original owners.

Also, that Amarrian was Empress Jamyl I and she was pod-captaining an Avatar-class titan at the time. And it was two shots: one for the titan, one for the pod.

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I’d rather rot inside of a DED cell than go to that hellscape. What happens there can stay there, up until the State starts taking it back.

Semantics, the point is the same.

23

Tell that to the millions they abduct while capsuleers farm the incursions, intentionally drawing them out and letting the abductions continue, all to earn brownie points with CONCORD.

Cynos don’t work in those systems, and until you can work out how to remove the crystalline structures obstructing the stargates, the only way to get in with the kind of firepower needed to retake the systems would require constructing new gates in Poch.

So… got a way to remove those structures, and prevent new gates from being blocked up, too? Because you can bet your last ISK that the empires are all working to figure that out. If one of them can do it, that nation could do more than retake Poch… they could take Poch. Which means they’d be in position to move their capitals into systems that give them first-strike capabilities deep into their rival’s space.

So, yeah, complain all you like, they’re working on it, I promise. At the very least, not one of them can allow the technology to do that to their gates to continue to exist without the means to counter it. It represents a fundamental risk to their ability to even keep their empires together.

Also, FYI? The fact that the Trigs haven’t exploited that un-counter-able advantage to completely cripple all four empires is kind of an indication that they’re not really concerned about being a threat, too. Because right now, indications are that they can utterly cripple basically anyone, whenever, just by stopping up the gates.

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See, that’s why I like you Arrendis. I just have to say something “wrong” or “misinformed” around you, and you give me all sorts of professional advice for free. Why do I even employ strategic advisors when I can just tell you I think the Federation are pushovers, and you’ll happily list off all their defensive weaknesses, avenues of attack and infiltration, and numerous other little details that might come in handy.

25

Ohhhhh no. You’re not gonna get me with that one… especially since I really haven’t paid much attention to Federal doctrines, policies, or even their TO&E. :stuck_out_tongue:

Besides, everyone knows you just wave hookers and drugs at them and they’ll do anything you want. :wink:

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26

Hm. I … am not sure this works quite the way you think of it, Arrendis.

I was an observer for ARC during the “weaving of Pochven.” I was in Kuharah when it happened, and sort of rode the system into its new … configuration, place, phase, whatever you want to call it.

As far as I could tell, what happened to the stargates wasn’t something the Triglavians did directly to them; it was more of an effect (I’d call it a side effect only I’m sure it was intended) of what happened to the whole system, all at once.

Basically we don’t have any sign the Triglavians can do this to individual stargates. We have a lot of indication, though, that a … let’s call it a “phase-shift” because why not … into Pochven “changes the rules” enough that existing artificial wormholes (literally what existing stargates are) get flooded with exotic matter.

The way I currently model the whole business goes something like this, proceeding in layers or else a sliding scale:

[start]
?
?
?
“normal” space
deadspace
deep deadspace (“deathglow” harvesting fields)
.
.
.
Pochven (stargates severed, natural wormhole formation involves ejection of probably millions of tons of exotic matter, moderate Trig-induced stellar “weather,” etc.)
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Triglavian Abyss (egger controlled filament access only; general access possible by means unknown to us eggers; Drifter DD no-workie and general Drifter combat functionality crippled; extreme stellar “weather”; strong Triglavian influence over spacetime, etc.)
?
?
?
[end]

That last might actually occupy several different tiers or just different region of the same. Either way it’s deep enough that spacetime gets really strange. Enough that local language patterns appear to presume communication among entities experiencing time at different speeds.

(If I were the Collective I would absolutely be fast-timing my R&D facilities where possible. Transfer scans of a bizarre new Talocan artifact when I wake up, have detailed reports by the time I’m dressed, updated theoretical physics models before I finish my coffee, and five generations of increasingly-sophisticated practical-application prototypes by day’s end. Sweet!)

Pochven’s not that strange, but it’s still pretty strange. It seems like it can’t form wormholes to K-space at all without spewing exotic matter all over at both ends, which is probably how the stargates got clogged. Not sure you could even purposely build a new stargate in unless you had a reliable way to clear the weird stuff (or rather let it clear itself-- it mostly seems to be a problem if there’s a structure there for it to get hung up in). If, as it seems, that’s an effect of the “depth” rather than a Triglavian tool at work, clogging gates probably just involves pulling the system into Pochven, which doesn’t seem to be a trivial feat.

(You know-- world ark, stellar transmuter, maybe weeks of relatively-undisturbed prep time, all that. They didn’t even really start beyond messing with the “weather” a bit until they were satisfied with their haul, and then they pulled it all “down” at once.)

So I think, basically, there’s nothing easy about it, even for the Collective.

27

I remember. Valerie thought the Drifter cruisers looked like delta-wing aircraft, IIRC.

I’d agree with this except for the timing. If this was something that just ‘happened’, as a long-term result of the changes the Trigs wrought in the star, then it would’ve happened progressively. Systems pushed into Liminality early would’ve seen it happen while the last systems to fall would have still been fought over.

Instead, it happened basically as soon as they hit 33 systems. In all of them.

That points to a decision being made to enact it.

28

Yeah. Except it took them from 9th month, 28th day to 10th month, 13th day. So, let’s see … 15 days. Pretty quick, but far from instant. (It seemed longer but then I was sitting there on a nutrient drip in my Anathema, waiting for whatever horrible thing was about to happen.) They had setup and synch time on everything, even the last system they had just captured. And then all of it went at once.

We noticed the gates start flickering around 10-9, so probably whatever they were doing started really moving towards “happening” around then. Four days’ warning that something alarming was going on.

Has more the feel of a large-scale engineering/construction project than a weapon, really. (And yes, admittedly a large-scale construction project that lands unannounced in your bedroom can feel pretty weapon-like.)

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Yep, but that still doesn’t point to an developing process that the Trigs didn’t specifically choose to set into motion. Nor is it an automatic effect of the Stellar Transmuters, or we’d see similar environmental effects hitting the systems where the Empires have built them.

Which indicates, taken together, that this is a separate process that the Trigs were in control over.

EDIT: And yeah, it has the feel of a large-scale engineering project… but it also has the feel of something that happened at their discretion. And in those two weeks, we didn’t see any specific new construction being put up in those systems that would say ‘this is what they used, so we can stop it with the 4d notice we might have’.

30

That’s not really what I was arguing, though. What I’m saying is …

That probably won’t work, for the same reason I don’t think this is a direct risk, itself:

It’s intentional almost for sure, but it’s something they do, intentionally, to the star, not (directly) to the gates. The empires might be able to replicate it but I doubt we have the kind of fine control needed to pull it off just yet.

Probably they’re working on it, but even if they can pull it off there’s the problem of not feeding it to the Collective (or someone arguably worse). The Collective might have used the Abyss to hide their home systems, but for that exact reason that hiding place is now taken by something with big, pointy teeth made of exotic plasma.

Edit: and I DO think it’s done to the star. We never saw any activity directed at the gates. The stars, on the other hand …


Kuharah in final liminality, but before Pochven;


Kuharah in Pochven, day 1.

I’m pretty sure it’s another stellar transmuter “we sank an entire system into abyssal deadspace” trick. Get to a certain depth, and any wormhole link connecting the system to K-space floods with exotic matter. If it’s natural, it just spews huge fountains of it at both ends, then stabilizes; if not, the matter gets hung up in the machinery and that’s that.

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31

But they didn’t. The system didn’t go anywhere. It’s right where it was, and anything in low/null you could have jumped to before, you can still jump to. People BlOps out of Poch all the time, no filaments needed.

And if it was a ‘stellar transmuter trick’, then with the transmuters reverse engineered, it should be something that can be countered.

32

So, that’s the funny thing, Arrendis-- you’re right; they didn’t “go” anywhere. You can even see the stars and other features of K-space when looking out through Pochven’s “weather” in places. I’d put good odds on a lot of the entities fighting in Pochven just arriving that way, too-- coming in by plain old warp drive from nearby systems, maybe.

That “they haven’t gone anywhere” thing is probably true of the Triglavian home systems themselves, though we don’t of course know where they’re supposed to be, and maybe that’s even why so many K-spacers who aren’t us find their way there: warping without a local destination isn’t a trick we can do. It seems like that could be a little like reaching certain coordinates and just, like, falling down an unlit hangar shaft, though.

(Or maybe they’re fully-encysted bubbles of spacetime weirdness and you have to spin starboard three times at the fifth asteroid from the left in such-and-such a belt, pull forward exactly 23.54 km at no faster than 300 meters per second and then full-stop, reverse course 100 meters, stop again, and sacrifice a goat or something.)

Anyway, I’m not sure what to say about the BLOPS wormholes; maybe there’s something about those that makes them different. But the stuff the stargates are sealed with seems to be the exact same stuff Triglavian conduits and Pochven wormholes consistently spewed, and still spew. It sounds like the anomaly is the jump bridge. Maybe it’s just that (as with, like, filaments) it doesn’t have an equivalent entry at the far end (you can’t bridge stuff through from the cyno to the BLOPS bridge generator), so whatever triggers the exotic matter surge doesn’t happen.

33

Right, but it’s not just BlOps wormholes. if someone’s got a capital in there, they can jump it out to a bog-standard cyno. You could conduit out a Rorq and a full mining fleet if you had them in there. And at no point will there be any exotic matter showing up.

Either way: it doesn’t seem to be something done through the stellar transmuter. Which means yeah, it might take them some prep time… but they could do it elsewhere, too.

34

I did … like … just say I think it needs to be open both ways for the exotic matter to get involved, right? Difference between the act of tunneling and a tunnel.

I’ll buy your assessment more readily if we ever find an isolated stargate that they’ve done it to. As it stands it seems like the problem would be them deciding to start plucking more Niarja-type bottleneck systems out of the gate network.

You do you, though. I mean, you will anyway.

(I wonder if the shipcasters could be configured for…?)

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