Regarding the Antarctica question...

[Atarlost]

It is extremely likely that the Ares, like their source material Cyteen, use recorded neural stimuli to create psychologically uniform clones. Otherwise they'd have no population advantage: the bottleneck in human reproduction isn't popping babies out of human wombs, it's being able to raise them for eighteen or more years.

They're probably a lot more hit and miss than Reseune in designing new psyche sets, but once they have one that works on clones they should be able to program that clone strain consistently.

[Song]

Eh....I'm dubious. Leaving aside the fact that you've got multiple factions in the Ares already, there's a very pragmatic reason to have variation in the brains of your cloned soldiers: if you've got extremely uniform soldiers, they'll all react the same way. This creates a single point of failure. It's better to have some variation built in, then use good old fashioned cult tactics to lock in an ideology. It won't be perfect, but it generally works pretty well.

This also applies more generally as well in addition to the good old brainwashing side of things. Personally I'd make damned certain my cloned soldiers had plenty of genetic variation (artificially induced, or by using multiple [ie: several thousand] template genomes), because I do not want them uniformly wiped out by any individual pathogen that may or may not crop up. While medicine is super-advanced in this setting, it's not perfect, and biological weapons are extremely tempting if your enemy has uniformly low resistance to them. And believe me, it doesn't matter how awesome their gene-tweaks are.....there is always something a new pathogen can latch on to. Especially if you've got an enemy with good microbiologists working on it.



All in all, while it's fun to speculate, I don't think we're gonna get any in-depth answers about the Ares for now. And not even in CSC America, probably. Maybe later though.


Edit: Yes, I've put thought into how to build up an effective cloned army. Everyone needs a hobby.

[JohnBWatson]

It is extremely likely that the Ares, like their source material Cyteen, use recorded neural stimuli to create psychologically uniform clones. Otherwise they'd have no population advantage: the bottleneck in human reproduction isn't popping babies out of human wombs, it's being able to raise them for eighteen or more years.

They're probably a lot more hit and miss than Reseune in designing new psyche sets, but once they have one that works on clones they should be able to program that clone strain consistently.

Similar technology is shown to exist in the hands of Clavicus, so I'd say your theory works well. It's probably a lot less precise than Clavicus's technique, given how expendable some of the Ares units are, but it'd be fairly easy to make a reasonably dissent - free society at a tolerably low resource cost given the tech level shown.

---

Eh....I'm dubious. Leaving aside the fact that you've got multiple factions in the Ares already, there's a very pragmatic reason to have variation in the brains of your cloned soldiers: if you've got extremely uniform soldiers, they'll all react the same way. This creates a single point of failure. It's better to have some variation built in, then use good old fashioned cult tactics to lock in an ideology. It won't be perfect, but it generally works pretty well.

In military affairs, no variation is optimal up to a fairly high rank so long as the upper echelon is competent and the training is up to date.

This also applies more generally as well in addition to the good old brainwashing side of things. Personally I'd make damned certain my cloned soldiers had plenty of genetic variation (artificially induced, or by using multiple [ie: several thousand] template genomes), because I do not want them uniformly wiped out by any individual pathogen that may or may not crop up. While medicine is super-advanced in this setting, it's not perfect, and biological weapons are extremely tempting if your enemy has uniformly low resistance to them. And believe me, it doesn't matter how awesome their gene-tweaks are.....there is always something a new pathogen can latch on to. Especially if you've got an enemy with good microbiologists working on it.

You need to breach the hull to introduce a pathogen, and if you can breach the hull, there are many less expensive, more reliable ways to ensure that everyone inside of it is satisfactorily dead.

[catfighter]

You need to breach the hull to introduce a pathogen, and if you can breach the hull, there are many less expensive, more reliable ways to ensure that everyone inside of it is satisfactorily dead.

Have you seen Rise of the Planet of the Apes? A little virus spread by any kind of contact, even with air in places that an infected person passed, killed the world in a very short amount of time. That is the biggest threat to a clone army and all that needs to happen is for a single viral unit to touch a single soldier, in any circumstance. I was told that matter weapons like the Hecates Cannon draw in material from space to create shots; microbes/viruses, especially anything simple enough to not require a lot of organelles, can survive in deep space for surprisingly long amounts of time (http://www.panspermia.org/bacteria.htm) and a single viral unit dropped into a ventilator could genocide the Ares race.

[JohnBWatson]

The process of drawing matter in from space and converting it to a thermonuclear projectile is likely to denature any DNA taken in.

[catfighter]

Viruses operate with RNA and dropping them (and even certain archaebacteria) into a roaring furnace hasn't seemed to kill all of them.

[JohnBWatson]

Viruses operate with RNA and dropping them (and even certain archaebacteria) into a roaring furnace hasn't seemed to kill all of them.

A thermonuclear howitzer is orders of magnitude hotter than a furnace. There's also the fact that the uptake process isn't likely to be connected to life support systems, and that space is much larger(and three dimensional) than is presented in - game, and a virus deployed in space is unlikely to ever reach anything in particular.

[catfighter]

Viruses operate with RNA and dropping them (and even certain archaebacteria) into a roaring furnace hasn't seemed to kill all of them.

A thermonuclear howitzer is orders of magnitude hotter than a furnace. There's also the fact that the uptake process isn't likely to be connected to life support systems, and that space is much larger(and three dimensional) than is presented in - game, and a virus deployed in space is unlikely to ever reach anything in particular.

Well I should hope it does is, or I'm going to have a little not-so-friendly chat with the weapons designer.

The vacuum of space creates huge pressure gradients in any clump of matter left sitting out there. The point is that any present spores are going to get smeared across an enormous volume and a ship is eventually going to run into one. Unless they have antimatter screening (in which case why not just ram enemy ships?) something is eventually going to get in. All ships have a weak point somewhere, be it as obvious as a non-antimatter/thermonuclear-screened airlock or the tiny micro-fracture in the starboard armor plate left from the last battle where something could lodge until a repairman handled it.

[sun1404]

A virus weapon wouldn't need to penetrate the hull of a ship to be effective. In fact, NOT penetrating the hull would be more effective. Just cover the ship with a sheen of virus, and wherever the ship dock, the entire station falls.

You could stage a failed assault at a big freighter convoy, have a few Centurians fire at each freighter with the virus weapon, let the Ares penetrate their shields, and have the squadron flee. The convoy themselves could survive for a long time, traveling from station to station, destroying much more Ares station than any Fleet squadron can.

[JohnBWatson]

The vacuum of space creates huge pressure gradients in any clump of matter left sitting out there. The point is that any present spores are going to get smeared across an enormous volume and a ship is eventually going to run into one. Unless they have antimatter screening (in which case why not just ram enemy ships?) something is eventually going to get in. All ships have a weak point somewhere, be it as obvious as a non-antimatter/thermonuclear-screened airlock or the tiny micro-fracture in the starboard armor plate left from the last battle where something could lodge until a repairman handled it.

The way armor works in Transcendence, it's impenetrable until it's destroyed completely.

---

A virus weapon wouldn't need to penetrate the hull of a ship to be effective. In fact, NOT penetrating the hull would be more effective. Just cover the ship with a sheen of virus, and wherever the ship dock, the entire station falls.

You could stage a failed assault at a big freighter convoy, have a few Centurians fire at each freighter with the virus weapon, let the Ares penetrate their shields, and have the squadron flee. The convoy themselves could survive for a long time, traveling from station to station, destroying much more Ares station than any Fleet squadron can.

Stations can detect and clean radiation for minimal cost, I'd guess it's the same for anything else. In addition, the Ares likely put a lot of funding into medical technology. Any civilization fielding space - dreadnoughts with plasma cannons is going to have a fairly advanced healthcare system.

[sun1404]

The whole point of bioweapons are to make them undetectable and uncurable, isn't it? If you take a strain of virus previously known as harmless, make them lethal to Ares population, the Ares wouldn't think to purge the ship until at least a few of their stations has been destroyed.

Better yet, make a whole new class of infectors, unlike anything ever seen before. Give them rapid diffusion in air, so that as soon as a ship docks at a station, the whole airlock is filled with it. As soon as even the smallest hole open, the air inside is filled with these infectors. Unless the Ares empties the airlock they can't purge it. And they wouldn't empty and airlock containing a freighter with valuable shipments. For all they know, these new infectors are just dust.

[JohnBWatson]

The whole point of bioweapons are to make them undetectable and uncurable, isn't it? If you take a strain of virus previously known as harmless, make them lethal to Ares population, the Ares wouldn't think to purge the ship until at least a few of their stations has been destroyed.

Better yet, make a whole new class of infectors, unlike anything ever seen before. Give them rapid diffusion in air, so that as soon as a ship docks at a station, the whole airlock is filled with it. As soon as even the smallest hole open, the air inside is filled with these infectors. Unless the Ares empties the airlock they can't purge it. And they wouldn't empty and airlock containing a freighter with valuable shipments. For all they know, these new infectors are just dust.

If a weapon like that were viable, someone would have used something like it already. At that point, cloning doesn't even matter - someone who can create a virus as effective as that can make it as universal as the common cold.

[catfighter]

The way armor works in Transcendence, it's impenetrable until it's destroyed completely.

That's the point. If it isn't destroyed completely, a lazy mechanic will eventually "forget" to clean off the inconspicuous dust in the tiny, unreachable crack in the metal. Then as soon as it is opened up for repair...

If a weapon like that were viable, someone would have used something like it already. At that point, cloning doesn't even matter - someone who can create a virus as effective as that can make it as universal as the common cold.

That's the thing... It would be extremely hard to develop, especially if it's made efficient. One genetic engineer devoted twenty years of his life to the sole purpose of making a tearless onion, only to discover that the sulfur which causes tears is what gave the onions their flavor. It would take an immense amount of time and effort, given the hit-and-miss trial-and-error nature of genetic engineering, but it would eventually be created.

This would actually be really interesting in-game; a virus suddenly appears and the galaxy panics. All medical equipment is suddenly incredibly valuable, illegal drugs are no longer frowned upon for the hope that they might work, and there is always the chance that the player gets infected and dies unless they can self-administer. Plague Inc., welcome back to the playing field!

[JohnBWatson]

If I recall, Neuroplague is the closest thing there is to that, and it's quite uncommon. It seems reasonable that, in the Transcendence universe, medical technology has done to the threat of disease what weapons technology has done to the threat of natural predators.

[TVR]

One-sided stories are notoriously incomplete.

From the perspective of an Ares scientist-clone or laborer-clone, it is the Commonwealth that obliterated Mars, killing most of the Syrtian race, and have now dispatched the Fleet into the Outer Realm to finish the job.

Every single Ares Commune that is destroyed is a bitter reminder.