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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); In-development patch notes for Starsector 0.98a (2/8/25)

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Author Topic: Does the Hegemony have the capability to build new "XIV-Type" ships (lorewise)?  (Read 3502 times)

Sleet

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Frankly i suspect the reason skins having "built to the specifications", and the hullmod saying "survivor of the original", is just a bug and Alex forgetting to change one of those with continuity drift.

Actually -- yeah, this tracks.

I still maintain that there is no real reason as to why the Hegemony isn't able to construct XIV ships -- the issue is whether they do.
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Baikal Daud's estranged wife -- a sentient derelict XIV Battlegroup hull
FACT: Kane Gleise did nothing wrong at Skathi.

"When the defiler unbinds the warp and weft of the Creator, what will they find behind that starry tapestry? A thousand thousand eyes darkened by trespass." - The Book of Ludds, Visions 7:4

hidefreek

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I think the Hegemony actually has the capability to build new 14th ships.
But they may not actively build or research the related tech for the show of hierarchy inside the Hegemony itself.
From "Princess of Persia" shows how the descendants of the original 14th discriminate against the Persean natives.
So they have a 14th production facility on either Eventide or Chicomoztec for elite status.
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Killer of Fate

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Frankly i suspect the reason skins having "built to the specifications", and the hullmod saying "survivor of the original", is just a bug and Alex forgetting to change one of those with continuity drift.

Actually -- yeah, this tracks.

I still maintain that there is no real reason as to why the Hegemony isn't able to construct XIV ships -- the issue is whether they do.

Why though? What evidence points to that? The time since the Collapse has been short enough for them to be enough to be used around. The only reason why the player is capable of building them is cause player isn't real, and the reason why there is not a simple finite amount of them is probably cuz it would take a lot of time to program and would just kinda shoot the faction in the foot.
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Sleet

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Frankly i suspect the reason skins having "built to the specifications", and the hullmod saying "survivor of the original", is just a bug and Alex forgetting to change one of those with continuity drift.

Actually -- yeah, this tracks.

I still maintain that there is no real reason as to why the Hegemony isn't able to construct XIV ships -- the issue is whether they do.

Why though? What evidence points to that? The time since the Collapse has been short enough for them to be enough to be used around. The only reason why the player is capable of building them is cause player isn't real, and the reason why there is not a simple finite amount of them is probably cuz it would take a lot of time to program and would just kinda shoot the faction in the foot.

The evidence is that the Hegemony almost certainly has the industrial capacity to do it via Chicomoztoc -- the giant forge world that's a substantial demographic anomaly in the Sector on account of its 10^8+ population size. You need to manufacture XIV components -- I'd imagine this is possible too, but probably requires a larger and more complex array of materials (likely a substantial amount of transplutonics?), and you probably need engineers and technicians with the expertise to put them together.

Manufacturing a post-collapse XIV hull is, therefore, in the realm of feasibility. The Hegemony probably still has XIV databanks, they have skilled technicians/logisticians/engineers, they have the raw industrial capacity. The issue is, of course, that it's probably not very economical as compared to their capacity to project power. The Domain could probably dedicate the heavy industry of several Chicomoztoc-scale planets with a state-of-the-art nanoforge each to produce a vast military formation with these structural modifications, resulting in the 14th Battlegroup; the Hegemony cannot. At some point, it's more effective to manufacture bog-standard 'Slaughts and Legions because you can make more of them and they still hold their own and serve their purpose.

Of course, we, the player, the anime protagonist of the Persean Sector, can recover, purchase, and manufacture XIV materiel because we're just that bloody awesome.
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Baikal Daud's estranged wife -- a sentient derelict XIV Battlegroup hull
FACT: Kane Gleise did nothing wrong at Skathi.

"When the defiler unbinds the warp and weft of the Creator, what will they find behind that starry tapestry? A thousand thousand eyes darkened by trespass." - The Book of Ludds, Visions 7:4

Killer of Fate

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Frankly i suspect the reason skins having "built to the specifications", and the hullmod saying "survivor of the original", is just a bug and Alex forgetting to change one of those with continuity drift.

Actually -- yeah, this tracks.

I still maintain that there is no real reason as to why the Hegemony isn't able to construct XIV ships -- the issue is whether they do.

Why though? What evidence points to that? The time since the Collapse has been short enough for them to be enough to be used around. The only reason why the player is capable of building them is cause player isn't real, and the reason why there is not a simple finite amount of them is probably cuz it would take a lot of time to program and would just kinda shoot the faction in the foot.

The evidence is that the Hegemony almost certainly has the industrial capacity to do it via Chicomoztoc -- the giant forge world that's a substantial demographic anomaly in the Sector on account of its 10^8+ population size. You need to manufacture XIV components -- I'd imagine this is possible too, but probably requires a larger and more complex array of materials (likely a substantial amount of transplutonics?), and you probably need engineers and technicians with the expertise to put them together.

Manufacturing a post-collapse XIV hull is, therefore, in the realm of feasibility. The Hegemony probably still has XIV databanks, they have skilled technicians/logisticians/engineers, they have the raw industrial capacity. The issue is, of course, that it's probably not very economical as compared to their capacity to project power. The Domain could probably dedicate the heavy industry of several Chicomoztoc-scale planets with a state-of-the-art nanoforge each to produce a vast military formation with these structural modifications, resulting in the 14th Battlegroup; the Hegemony cannot. At some point, it's more effective to manufacture bog-standard 'Slaughts and Legions because you can make more of them and they still hold their own and serve their purpose.

Of course, we, the player, the anime protagonist of the Persean Sector, can recover, purchase, and manufacture XIV materiel because we're just that bloody awesome.

It's not an issue of industrial output. It's an issue of technology. XIV ships are tweaked to perfection and the fact that they don't break in spite of having top tier armor more flexible systems (more ordinance points) is only achievable thanks to the fact that they were made using the best possible available technology in the Domain.

Spoiler
Technology that was probably far more precise and required very different materials to what we have now in the Persean Sector. And speaking of transplutonics. You should remember that there are stuff like Domain-Era arrays hanging about in systems. And these are made of among other things, volatiles. Something that heavy industry cannot process. And is only utilized in fuel production which is incapable of sustaining large planetary flotillas without an access to a fuel production item.

This is how backwards the tech in Sector is. We need an item to produce enough fuel to maintain ships. An item that is in finite amount and cannot be replicated and probably will not be possible to replicate for hundreds or even thousands of years to come. Same goes for nanoforges, though these are somewhat more common.
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Chicomoztoc is large, but it is also a wasteland. Compared to old worlds of the Domain, it has nothing. It is using a nanoforge, sure. It has functional industries, sure. It has military patrols guarding it, yes. It probably has humongous metropolitan cities sprawling across tens of miles of its land.

But that doesn't mean anything. The level of technology in Starsector exists between being relatively comprehensive to magical in nature. And the thing is that XIV is meant to be more latter than former.

Spoiler
Real Domain worlds were probably billions in population, or at least covered in gigantic metropolitan complexes. Green of colour like Gilead but without mercy to the land like the Luddic Church asks you to be. Guarded by multiple star fortresses and sending out thousands of ships to exterminate those willing to oppose the central rule. Capable of assembling eldritch tools so easily they were treated like goods to be traded by privatized entities.
[close]

Tessies could easily assemble XIV ships. Remnants could probably figure that out too. Tri-Tachyon would be able to if they cooperated with Hegemony rather than jumped at each other's throats. But that is the point of the game. The world did not die because it disconnected from the core, but because no one bothered to build anything on something else than military-industrial prowess.
« Last Edit: November 22, 2023, 12:47:33 PM by Killer of Fate »
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Nettle

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One thing some people automatically assume here is that Hegemony actually seeks to produce them, it might not be the case. There is nothing really exceptional about XIV variants, the modifications they have, as per 14th Battlegroup hullmod description, are just 100 "standard units" increase in armor plating and 4% improved capacitors performance. This is something that can be easily reproduced with existing hullmods, and while this seems to be the kind of meticulous optimisation Domain era engineers cared about, its probably not a priority anymore.
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Sleet

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It's not an issue of industrial output. It's an issue of technology. XIV ships are tweaked to perfection and the fact that they don't break in spite of having top tier armor more flexible systems (more ordinance points) is only achievable thanks to the fact that they were made using the best possible available technology in the Domain. Technology that was probably far more precise and required very different materials to what we have now in the Persean Sector

Chicomoztoc is large, but it is also a wasteland. Compared to old worlds of the Domain it has nothing. It is using a nanoforge, sure. It has functional industries, sure. It has military patrols guarding it, yes. It probably has humongous metropolitan cities sprawling across tens of miles of its land.

But that doesn't mean anything. The level of technology in Starsector exists between being relatively comprehensive to magical in nature. And the thing is that XIV is meant to be more latter than former.

Tessies could easily assemble XIV ships. Remnants could probably figure that out too. Tri-Tachyon would be able to if they cooperated with Hegemony rather than jumped at each other's throats. But that is the point of the game. The world did not die because it disconnected from the core, but because no one bothered to build anything on something else than military-industrial prowess.

I feel like you're making a lot of assumptions here -- which admittedly, is kind of the point - a lot of Starsector lore is vague and all we have in some areas is speculation - but it's still worth noting that your assumption that the Hegemony doesn't have the technological capacity to build more is precisely that: an assumption. I'm not trying to be dismissive of what you have to say, of course, but I feel like asserting that the XIV hulls are impossible to manufacture for some unknown technological reason is premature.

You're also being unfair to Chicomoztoc: yeah it's a wasteland, but So What? It might be unremarkable compared to the Domain-typical worlds, but the raw human strength of hundreds of millions of people is not to be discounted. Its heavy industry is suggested to be immense: it's a whole order of magnitude larger than Kazeron, its closest rival in industrial strength (and Kazeron is only a rival because of its pristine nanoforge, which Chico also has). To say the demography of Chicomoztoc "dominates" the Persean Sector almost feels like an understatement.

A strong industrial base is necessary for technological developments. To acquire a technology, a society needs industry and talent. This is a setting where the Ziggurat exists, mind you -- obviously, TriTach specialises in advanced tech research, but the Hegemony still (as seen by the seizure of Kallichore and Daud's 'new terms' over the campaign) exercises practicable suzerainty over the Galatia Academy, which produces some of the Sector's finest minds -- many of whom will become top-level Hegemony theorists, officers, engineers, scientists, etc. The Hegemony, on top of this, has access to existing XIV-type hulls and presumably has, or can acquire, full knowledge on how the structural modifications fundamentally work.

I still see absolutely no reason that the Hegemony would be incapable of manufacturing an existing XIV hull. XIV ships aren't 'magic' -- they have better armour and a more solid flux grid.

One thing some people automatically assume here is that Hegemony actually seeks to produce them, it might not be the case. There is nothing really exceptional about XIV variants, the modifications they have, as per 14th Battlegroup hullmod description, are just 100 "standard units" increase in armor plating and 4% improved capacitors performance. This is something that can be easily reproduced with existing hullmods, and while this seems to be the kind of meticulous optimisation Domain era engineers cared about, its probably not a priority anymore.
To be clear, armour doesn't scale linearly -- 100 units can actually be a huge increase depending on what it's mounted on, and it's still good on less armoured hulls.

But yeah, I'm not claiming that the Hegemony wants to manufacture more. Just that they have the capacity to. Obviously, it's suboptimal military-economic strategy to produce these very expensive hulls when Hegemony warfleets come in industrial ol' reliable bulk, not seamlessly well-fashioned ships.

The vibes I get are definitely that they don't produce more, and I think Occam's Razor suggests the "too expensive" rationale checks out. There's also probably a vested interest for those annoying Eventider aristocrat slimeballs who want to maintain their political status as descendants of the 14th. Imagine the horror if Baikal 'Hive-Dirt' Daud could produce XIV hulls for his low-life Mozzie criminal friends!

And there we find the anachronisms at the Hegemony's heart: the Domain is dead, these venerable old warships are all that's left, and in part they represent perfectly the reasons that it died. Despite this, the Hegemony cherishes the mythos of the 14th Battlegroup, playing inside the gargantuan skeleton of the civilisation it helped kill.
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Baikal Daud's estranged wife -- a sentient derelict XIV Battlegroup hull
FACT: Kane Gleise did nothing wrong at Skathi.

"When the defiler unbinds the warp and weft of the Creator, what will they find behind that starry tapestry? A thousand thousand eyes darkened by trespass." - The Book of Ludds, Visions 7:4

Killer of Fate

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It's not an issue of industrial output. It's an issue of technology. XIV ships are tweaked to perfection and the fact that they don't break in spite of having top tier armor more flexible systems (more ordinance points) is only achievable thanks to the fact that they were made using the best possible available technology in the Domain. Technology that was probably far more precise and required very different materials to what we have now in the Persean Sector

Chicomoztoc is large, but it is also a wasteland. Compared to old worlds of the Domain it has nothing. It is using a nanoforge, sure. It has functional industries, sure. It has military patrols guarding it, yes. It probably has humongous metropolitan cities sprawling across tens of miles of its land.

But that doesn't mean anything. The level of technology in Starsector exists between being relatively comprehensive to magical in nature. And the thing is that XIV is meant to be more latter than former.

Tessies could easily assemble XIV ships. Remnants could probably figure that out too. Tri-Tachyon would be able to if they cooperated with Hegemony rather than jumped at each other's throats. But that is the point of the game. The world did not die because it disconnected from the core, but because no one bothered to build anything on something else than military-industrial prowess.

I feel like you're making a lot of assumptions here -- which admittedly, is kind of the point - a lot of Starsector lore is vague and all we have in some areas is speculation - but it's still worth noting that your assumption that the Hegemony doesn't have the technological capacity to build more is precisely that: an assumption. I'm not trying to be dismissive of what you have to say, of course, but I feel like asserting that the XIV hulls are impossible to manufacture for some unknown technological reason is premature.

You're also being unfair to Chicomoztoc: yeah it's a wasteland, but So What? It might be unremarkable compared to the Domain-typical worlds, but the raw human strength of hundreds of millions of people is not to be discounted. Its heavy industry is suggested to be immense: it's a whole order of magnitude larger than Kazeron, its closest rival in industrial strength (and Kazeron is only a rival because of its pristine nanoforge, which Chico also has). To say the demography of Chicomoztoc "dominates" the Persean Sector almost feels like an understatement.

A strong industrial base is necessary for technological developments. To acquire a technology, a society needs industry and talent. This is a setting where the Ziggurat exists, mind you -- obviously, TriTach specialises in advanced tech research, but the Hegemony still (as seen by the seizure of Kallichore and Daud's 'new terms' over the campaign) exercises practicable suzerainty over the Galatia Academy, which produces some of the Sector's finest minds -- many of whom will become top-level Hegemony theorists, officers, engineers, scientists, etc. The Hegemony, on top of this, has access to existing XIV-type hulls and presumably has, or can acquire, full knowledge on how the structural modifications fundamentally work.

I still see absolutely no reason that the Hegemony would be incapable of manufacturing an existing XIV hull. XIV ships aren't 'magic' -- they have better armour and a more solid flux grid.

Neither Hegemony or Tri-Tachyon are impressive technologically. Tri-Tachyon lacks the manpower, but has the understanding. Hegemony has the manpower but is lacking in knowledge to make anything.

If Hegemony and Tri-Tachyon joined forces they would be unstoppable and probably rekindled the sector in a few decades.

But you see... The point is that the Hegemony sees themselves the way you do them. It doesn't matter how many people they have. Especially if most of these people *** despise them for being authoritarian militarists who believe safety is more important than access to food, water, and information.

Chicomoztoc is a wasteland, it has suffered so many wars, it is polluted to the extreme. Most of its citizens want to secede from its stupid nonsense, because they would rather be on their own than serving a failing government that only cares about ONSLAUGHTS and LEGIONS, and EAGLES...

And yet they declare themselves true descendants of Domain, even though they have failed to do anything to prevent the pain of the old and new world. Because they have been fighting a failing since before the Collapse war with tools too restricted to succeed the way it was done before. But they are so good at propaganda, everyone just believes them that they're the good guys.

But if you listen to Hegemony evil theme, read their descriptions and think about how the Sector looks like in spite of them technically managing to be in charge relatively well, you realize that they're just an army specializing in organizing everyone into structures. Like a king painting a vase with human blood.

But, hey...
It's just a theory...
A GAME THEORY
THANKS FOR *explodes*
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shiranpp

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well. it depends.
i think it lake the ability to improve or redesign to better version.
but swap hull mod/ability or weapon hardpoint type is probability ok.

LG has made some new Hegemony las ship.
Im not surprise if some group in Heg made some AAF eagle/falcon with all bal weapon.
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Tindahbawx

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I mean why would you use a normal onslaught over a XIV one? It's effectively a straight downgrade.

Maybe its just a cost issue, like every military has to deal with. Yes you could have fewer super special XVI Onslaughts, but perhaps they're just hangar queens and require a lot of downtime or the upgraded systems are finickitey and require additional maintenance beyond what is represented in the stats cards for them. May as well just go with more regular Onslaughts that "do the job" over the ones that work better but are more logistically heavy to deal with.

I'd guess it's a tech issue rather than anything else. They have the blueprints and the materials, but actually making them likely requires higher tech materials and parts than Sector can make. At most they can force an orbital pristine forge to make the ships slowly, painstakingly hand-checking parts for quality, and even then they're D-modded.

I like that idea, like dealing with an old worn out printer that doesnt want to do anything but the most basic black and white print jobs anymore. Sure you can put a colour photo print through it, but the result is abyssmal.
« Last Edit: November 23, 2023, 07:32:16 AM by Tindahbawx »
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Randolf

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Maybe its just a cost issue, like every military has to deal with. Yes you could have fewer super special XVI Onslaughts, but perhaps they're just hangar queens and require a lot of downtime or the upgraded systems are finickitey and require additional maintenance beyond what is represented in the stats cards for them. May as well just go with more regular Onslaughts that "do the job" over the ones that work better but are more logistically heavy to deal with.


I doubt the XVI Onslaughts are hanger queens more than their normal brethren. The description of a XIV battlegroup modification states that the major change was structural in nature, while the increase in flux was from "Exceptionally well-tuned energy systems". So while the idea of Hegemony might no longer have the tech base to build them (it is also noted in the XIV description that the structural changes were done with pre-collapsed techniques) is credible, there is no lore nor in game mechanics that show the XIV Onslaught is more costly to upkeep than a baseline Onslaught.

Honestly I just don't see why they wouldn't only field XIV Onslaughts if they could make them. The modification hurts the mobility stat sure but the Onslaught is already a flying brick. A +100 increase in armor is merely a drop in the bucket of a Onslaught but every bit helps when you use a shield shunt build on them, not to mention all the ways to gain percentage increases to armor too. The real winner is the %4 flux stats as the Onslaughts base stats are so large that the boosts are actually fairly large (+750 capacity and +30 dissipation) and that they get +10 OP. Conversely the stat increases are not large enough that if the XIV Onslaughts were hanger queens compared to the normal then we would likely never see them at all. They would probably be mothballed somewhere in a last stand style reserve and/or you might see one as a flagship for a major system patrol or as a parade piece.
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Bungee_man

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The early concept of the game, looking at old blog posts, was that the technology on hand was very old, nobody understood it, and that regression was inevitable at some point, unless something decisive happened to tip the scales. Under that narrative, the XIV hulls being the Hegemony's original equipment, gradually depleting through attrition, makes sense.

In newer builds, both because the third dev, who had a stronger preference towards grimdark, ended up departing at some point, and because of the natural power creep that occurs as a sandbox game gets bigger and more fleshed-out, we see high-end research universities in Hegemony territory, secret weapons projects, and the ability to construct a functional, fully-fledged civilization (on an admittedly abstracted timescale). Part of the mechanics associated with that allow the player to steal Hegemony blueprints, as others have mentioned, and use them to print XIV ships.

Under either narrative, I think it makes sense for the XIV ships to be original XIV legion assets, with the bog-standard ships mixed among them serving as replacements due to attrition. While it certainly fits the old atmosphere, for obvious reasons, the idea of the Hegemony slowly transforming from a Domain Legion with the stated goal of reintegrating the sector into something else entirely meshes well with more recent plot elements. The conversation with Daud, in particular, is a very good example of what defines the Hegemony - the public line of restoring the Domain, symbolized by the dwindling fleet of XIV ships, and the uncertain - but potentially hopeful - future symbolized by the new ships being produced to replace them as they are rendered inoperable.
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Candesce

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The description of a XIV battlegroup modification states that the major change was structural in nature, while the increase in flux was from "Exceptionally well-tuned energy systems".
"Exceptionally well-tuned" isn't free.

It's not showing up in the supply cost, so it's presumably not a maintenance issue, but probably a matter of better trained shipbuilders, using higher-quality equipment, and maybe accepting significantly more wastage in construction in parts thrown out because their tuning was off. But all of that adds up, and can do so fast, especially if the people with the particular training and equipment are reserving it for themselves as a matter of maintaining status.

And then you're stuck with the problem: the Shipbuilder's Guild can build N ships per year, you need 10N ships per year, and the Guild won't teach anyone their special tricks for getting the XIV type built properly?

You can't afford to break the guild, so instead you just build what you can without their tricks. Which means no XIV.
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Demetrious

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Of course, we, the player, the anime protagonist of the Persean Sector, can recover, purchase, and manufacture XIV materiel because we're just that bloody awesome.

From the point of view of anyone cranking these out to equip multiple battle fleets for an entire faction, a 20% hike in cost for a 10% increase in firepower just doesn't jell, but for a wealthy mercenary captain who's going to be leading exactly one fleet, and always from a flagship under heavy fire? Cash or check?
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