Or the fact that human knowledge isn't well hidden (rather the opposite), and that the Nomads gain the knowledge of anyone they infest?
Basically, Strom, you have no idea what you're talking about. There's no reason to suggest that Nomad telepathy is based on easy-to-reproduce electromagnetic waves, nor any reason to suggest that acting spontaneously and spazzing out will make them react in any manner other than "wow, this guy's crazy, should be easy to kill him".
Also, a patrol could be made up of only one controlling consciousness, but it could also be four or five. For example, 5 keepers go on patrol. They are not one mind with five ships, they are five minds with five ships with perfect communication, and there's no difference in the efficiency of their communications if they were in one patrol or all out alone in entirely different systems.
I'm going to quote myself since nobody seems to have noticed me.
Quote:Biological weapons would be able to, at most, destroy a single ship and possibly other ships in very close physical proximity (anything in range of its "feelers"). The piece of the consciousness controlling that ship would be hit by it, but not killed- death of a controlled ship does affect the Nomads, but not a whole lot. Such weapons, regardless of origin, would do the same thing as shooting the ships with guns would do- kill the vessel.
To target the collective, you'd need to either A) target their power supply like opening the hypergate did, or B) target the telepathic network itself. The latter option would require humans with telepathic abilities or machines duplicating that- as well as intimate knowledge of how the Nomads talk to each other. If you could build machines that "talked" the same way Nomads did, you could theoretically DDoS the Mindshare, keeping them from communicating and either driving the minds insane or at least immobilizing the physical manifestations (meaning that a group of strike teams could clean house fairly effectively). Theoretically. If you didn't keep it secretive enough, they might find a way to resist it or do something similar to modulating a comm frequency- "dodging" your interference. You'd need to catch them by surprise, and with enough machines to knock out the network in one fell swoop. That's the sort of thing you should be looking at for this.
It's entirely possible that the Nomads have already foreseen such a "weakness" and have already set up protocols to deal with it and thus avoid another disaster like the Battle of Omicron Major. But if you wanted to "capture" a Nomad ship, this would be where you should start looking- using telepathic abilities similar to the Nomads to "blot out" a small area from the network as well as keeping the mental imprint running the ship occupied instead of self-destructing. I have a theory on how you might "assassinate" a given personality, but that's not for display until I've thought about it more- and there's no way humans could figure it out with their current level of understanding.
I just handed you a mechanism for what you want to do. Not exactly a practical one, but if there was a practical method to exterminate the Nomads then that wouldn't be very fun, would it?
I'd also like to point out to Strom and Jeffrey T that you are ignoring the points brought up by Treewyrm, who is basically responsible for the modern, Discovery implementation of the Nomads. His word, while not technically law, is damned well informed. Listen to him.
Oh, and go read the Nomad Lore. Link to the older version without downloading it is here, link to download the newest version is here.
No, I'm not missing hybrids. I was meaning mentally in that sense. They don't understand our mental process, as was shown by thier failed attempts in the original story line, any better than we do thiers.
Quote:Or the fact that human knowledge isn't well hidden (rather the opposite), and that the Nomads gain the knowledge of anyone they infest?
Sovereign
They gain the knowledge of what that person knows, yes, that doesn't mean they understand the hows and whys of our mental processes. First off, 99.9 percent of humanity doesn't understand itself, and second most of the "facts" we know, are wrong. We memorise it wrong, we mess it up through the fog of time, or we just plain form erroneous conclusions. Then take into the account that knowledge of a thing and the ability to use it do not equate to mastery of or knowledge of it's inner workings. Any idiot knows about gravity. Most have a grasp of it's meaning to, not only us, but the physical universe. Few understand the mechanics of it. And none can prove it as anything other than a local effect. (FYI: Gravity is a theory, it cannot be proven as of yet, look it up, it's pretty interesting.)
Quote:Basically, Strom, you have no idea what you're talking about. There's no reason to suggest that Nomad telepathy is based on easy-to-reproduce electromagnetic waves, nor any reason to suggest that acting spontaneously and spazzing out will make them react in any manner other than "wow, this guy's crazy, should be easy to kill him".
Sovereign
First, don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. We are to a point in the game where we are making the mythos ourselves, and that makes my input as valuable as yours. It could very well be that what I say will become cannon and what you say discarded like the mornings bowel movement. Get over yourself.
Second, I didn't state that it would be easily reproduced, in fact if you read my earlier post on this you would know I state quite the opposite. What I state is that if it exists, it can be reproduced. We find it, reproduced it, and weaponize it. That's what humans do best.
Third, there is, actually, evidence that thier cohesion falls apart in battle. It's the way we won in the original story line. They outnumbered us, had us on tech-level, and even on pilot skill. But we won. Why? I think it's because we surprised them. They couldn't predict us, couldn't keep up with our mental agility. Part of that is, no doubt, because if you give an entity to much to think about, to much to do, it overloads. Try it yourself. With your left hand type, "I love fun." over and over. With your right hand juggle two eggs. With your right foot tap a continous beat, bum bum bumumum bum bumpity bump. With your left foot bounce a soccer ball. You aren't going to be able to do it long, if at all, and certainly not without total concentration. Any interruption will cause you to lose it all. This is true of all entities. Overload it, and it fails at the given tasks.
And lastly, we know that there are not that many of them. That means that each entity has to controll multiples of ships. Now, say in a given patrol there are ships controlled by multiple entities, then, since there are so few nomads, each entity will control multiple ships, in multiple patrols, making the strain all the greater. We have the numbers to overwhelm them with sensory input from battle. One on one, the tactics I envisioned would merely give you the advantage of being totally unpredictable, no small matter in battle. How many of you use tactics that allow you to predict what your opponent is going to do next so as to hit them with a slower moving weapon? However, if we do it enmass, we not only ruin thier battle predictions, we overload them, making thier responses more sluggish and less precise, enhancing our own advantage.
"Two things I know; Gravity sucks and Ion Storms blow. And that proves the universe is trying to kill us all" - Barren Waste, Captain of the Wasteland Wanderer
An approximation of my reaction when I see my next victim...er, these forums.
No, I'm not missing hybrids. I was meaning mentally in that sense. They don't understand our mental process, as was shown by thier failed attempts in the original story line, any better than we do thiers.
18 years of studying human psychology through their hosts, any and all data that humanity itself has come up with in the past 1000 years, and doing experiments probably gives them at least a good idea of what we think even if they don't fully understand the mechanisms behind it.
Quote: Sovereign
They gain the knowledge of what that person knows, yes, that doesn't mean they understand the hows and whys of our mental processes. First off, 99.9 percent of humanity doesn't understand itself, and second most of the "facts" we know, are wrong. We memorise it wrong, we mess it up through the fog of time, or we just plain form erroneous conclusions. Then take into the account that knowledge of a thing and the ability to use it do not equate to mastery of or knowledge of it's inner workings. Any idiot knows about gravity. Most have a grasp of it's meaning to, not only us, but the physical universe. Few understand the mechanics of it. And none can prove it as anything other than a local effect. (FYI: Gravity is a theory, it cannot be proven as of yet, look it up, it's pretty interesting.)
See above. A human warrior doesn't need to know brain chemistry to be able to predict whether his opponent is about to attack from above or the side. If there are humans capable of dealing effectively with other humans, then the Nomads can learn how they do it just as well, if not better.
Oh, and I call bulldung on your gravity "example" (even though if it were true it would prove my point rather than yours). Calling something a "theory" has no bearing on the state of its acceptance in scientific knowledge. "Lookitup."
Quote: Sovereign
First, don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. We are to a point in the game where we are making the mythos ourselves, and that makes my input as valuable as yours. It could very well be that what I say will become cannon and what you say discarded like the mornings bowel movement. Get over yourself.
You tried to explain that spazzing out in combat would make Nomads go insane. You also claimed that a given patrol had only one mind, rather than one mind per ship (if you've ever fought the Keepers, that should be perfectly obvious that there's more than one mind). Treewyrm has been working with Nomad RP and developing how they work in Discovery for years. I, along with a number of others, have assisted in writing the Nomad Lore document which is about fifty pages long (last I checked) and took several months to write (not to mention the years of ingame and forum work leading up to it). You or anyone else cannot simply walk in and say "well my opinion is as valid as the past three years of accepted activity, just because I said so". It doesn't work that way. Your input, while not meaningless, is most certainly not as "valuable" as, say, Treewyrm's when answering a question like "how do the Nomads operate in a given situation".
I believe I am indeed entitled to tell you that you have no idea what you're talking about. It's not unlike someone with a PhD in physics telling off another person's idea that momentum is in fact not conserved. The people who play Nomads and have been playing Nomads for years and have written 90% of everything there is to know about Nomads are most definitely more qualified than you are. So shut the hell up.
Quote:Second, I didn't state that it would be easily reproduced, in fact if you read my earlier post on this you would know I state quite the opposite. What I state is that if it exists, it can be reproduced. We find it, reproduced it, and weaponize it. That's what humans do best.
By "easily reproduced" I meant "easy by comparison to genetically engineering humans to have telepathic abilities and then designing machines with which to simulate that and then building millions of them so that you could try and overload the Nomad consciousness". As we have stated, there is no connection in physical mediums like electromagnetic waves (which is what you said). It's telepathy, not radios. You would need to find something that interacts with their telepathy, and then build machines to give off the same signals. Which is exactly what I suggested, but nobody seems to have read it.
Quote:Third, there is, actually, evidence that thier cohesion falls apart in battle. It's the way we won in the original story line. They outnumbered us, had us on tech-level, and even on pilot skill. But we won. Why? I think it's because we surprised them. They couldn't predict us, couldn't keep up with our mental agility. Part of that is, no doubt, because if you give an entity to much to think about, to much to do, it overloads. Try it yourself. With your left hand type, "I love fun." over and over. With your right hand juggle two eggs. With your right foot tap a continous beat, bum bum bumumum bum bumpity bump. With your left foot bounce a soccer ball. You aren't going to be able to do it long, if at all, and certainly not without total concentration. Any interruption will cause you to lose it all. This is true of all entities. Overload it, and it fails at the given tasks.
You start with "evidence". Your "evidence", however, is prefaced by "I think". I call shenanigans. Combat of any kind is strenuous and requires intense concentration- if humans can handle all of that information with only their one little bitsy brain, do you seriously think that an entity with access to millions of other brains to "outsource" analysis of combat data to would have the slightest bit of trouble? If they did, they simply couldn't fight at all. It wouldn't be a matter of fighting humans specifically, they'd flop over and die if engaged by a stationary weapons platform. And that's just silly.
Quote:And lastly, we know that there are not that many of them. That means that each entity has to controll multiples of ships. Now, say in a given patrol there are ships controlled by multiple entities, then, since there are so few nomads, each entity will control multiple ships, in multiple patrols, making the strain all the greater. We have the numbers to overwhelm them with sensory input from battle. One on one, the tactics I envisioned would merely give you the advantage of being totally unpredictable, no small matter in battle. How many of you use tactics that allow you to predict what your opponent is going to do next so as to hit them with a slower moving weapon? However, if we do it enmass, we not only ruin thier battle predictions, we overload them, making thier responses more sluggish and less precise, enhancing our own advantage.
I suppose that if every single Nomad vessel was engaged simultaneously that would cause some issues. Then again, you also mistake the numbers of their ships for the numbers of their consciousnesses- since a consciousness cannot die, and new consciousnesses can be formed, there's no shortage there- not infinite, but a lot. Ships, however, get destroyed. The Nomads do not have a particularly vast supply of ships. That does not mean they do not have enough minds to run them.
What you're doing is slurring things about the Nomads and thinking that what applies in one place must be true in an unrelated place. Aristotle did a nice proof of the elemental spheres and stuff... but it started with "there are four elements, which are earth, water, air, and fire" so everything else is garbage. You need to start with correct information to begin applying logic to it, and you need to apply logic correctly. GO READ THE NOMAD LORE. Further posts of yours will be ignored until you convince me that you've read it, or at least give a damn about what we've been doing for the past couple years.
For those intrested in the questions posed, I have here more supporting evidence, taken from the Nomad Lore Report written by Treewyrm, to support my theories. This will be a long post, as I not only post the excerpts, but rebutt quotes from Sovereign. For those who want it short, I postulate that the Nomads have two main weaknesses and that unpredictable tactics as well as targeting thier biomechanical interfaces is the way to attack them succesfully. The Nomad Lore Report seems to coaberate my theories.
Quote:18 years of studying human psychology through their hosts, any and all data that humanity itself has come up with in the past 1000 years, and doing experiments probably gives them at least a good idea of what we think even if they don't fully understand the mechanisms behind it.
Sovereign
Quote:The Nomads know this quite well and use those vulnerabilities for their own benefit, they have studied human history from their own unique "perspective" and, as shown, are able to effectively incorporating into it, masking into everyday roles. As a result this differs much from understanding of
independent human groups whichever they may be called.
Discovery Roleplaying Community Nomads Extended Lore (Here after refered to as DRCNEL)
That is exactly what I said. They don't understand us any better than we do them. They can predict what a normal human individual might do, much as we can predict them. However, if we do as I propose and drastically alter our responses each time we encounter them, we can sow confusion, giving us an edge. This can be used both tactically and strategically.
Quote:Oh, and I call bulldung on your gravity "example" (even though if it were true it would prove my point rather than yours). Calling something a "theory" has no bearing on the state of its acceptance in scientific knowledge.
Sovereign
Actually, what I said was you can't prove gravity. And I'm right. Here is an excerpt from the link you gave.
Incedentally, it also disproves your quoted statement.
Quote:"Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory." The "unprovable but falsifiable" nature of theories is a necessary consequence of using inductive logic
Karl Popper, Stephen Hawking, and Wikpedia
[/quote]You also claimed that a given patrol had only one mind, rather than one mind per ship (if you've ever fought the Keepers, that should be perfectly obvious that there's more than one mind).
Quote: Soveriegn
Actually what I said was,
Quote:And lastly, we know that there are not that many of them. That means that each entity has to controll multiples of ships. Now, say in a given patrol there are ships controlled by multiple entities, then, since there are so few nomads, each entity will control multiple ships, in multiple patrols, making the strain all the greater.
and
Quote:Well, each of thier patrols contains multiple ships, but is controlled by only one mind.
meaning one mind per patrol.
Both of my statements can be true, as shown by the following quote from the DRCNEL. Incidentally it also provides supportive evidence that Nomads can control only so many processes at one time and can be overwhelmed.
Quote:Nomad entity may have several physical manifestations at the same time, each can be
controlled independently and simultaneously. The amount of these forms is based on
complexity and telepathic power a single entity holds. Normally they have two or three forms,
though only one or two are being active at a given time. Advisors, however, being more
advanced that the rest are capable of single-handedly controlling small and medium-sized
fleets.
DRCNEL
Quote:I suppose that if every single Nomad vessel was engaged simultaneously that would cause some issues. Then again, you also mistake the numbers of their ships for the numbers of their consciousnesses- since a consciousness cannot die, and new consciousnesses can be formed, there's no shortage there- not infinite, but a lot. Ships, however, get destroyed. The Nomads do not have a particularly vast supply of ships. That does not mean they do not have enough minds to run them.
Sovereign
This paragraph is wrong on so many levels it's funny, especially coming from a self proffessed expert. First, the nomads have MORE ships than nomad minds, as shown in an afore mentioned quote from the DRCNEL. You also say here that we would have to engage every single vessel to sow confusion, but the DDCNEL puts lie to this as well, stating there are deffinate limits to thier contol and abilities.
Nomad entity may have several physical manifestations at the same time, each can be
controlled independently and simultaneously. The amount of these forms is based on
complexity and telepathic power a single entity holds. Normally they have two or three forms,
though only one or two are being active at a given time. Advisors, however, being more
advanced that the rest are capable of single-handedly controlling small and medium-sized
fleets.
Quote: DRCNEL
Certain emotions they have are shared among the rest, when one feels anger all those nearby feel the same.
Quote: DRCNEL
Any other Nomad is capable of "looking" through another Nomads' senses and will sometimes advise or gather information at the same time as the "host" Nomad.[quote] DRCNEL
In conclusion, the Discovery Rollplaying Community Nomad Extended Lore supports my theories. Now I leave it up to the rest of the you to decide if, supported or not, they will become part of our rollplaying environment. As for you Soveriegn, keep the personal attacks to yourself, the forums clear of profanity, and amusing us with your ignorance. Not only did you rave at me like a lunatic, almost every statement you made was proven wrong by the very things you tried to prove them with. Please, stick your foot in your mouth more often.
"Two things I know; Gravity sucks and Ion Storms blow. And that proves the universe is trying to kill us all" - Barren Waste, Captain of the Wasteland Wanderer
An approximation of my reaction when I see my next victim...er, these forums.