It liked to imagine the contents of its memory store written out on cards little slips of paper with tiny writing on them, big enough for a human to read. The Mind had an image to illustrate its information capacity. A Culture mind is capable of truly insane calculations, outperforming even the most powerful Forerunner ancilla every created. Their greatest advantage, arguably, are their onboard AIs, known as Minds. This swamps the entire targeted volume in enormous amounts of energy. They can also induce Gridfire, which involves pulling down infinite energy from 4D space to intersect with the skein (normal 3D space). They can use this to move around comfortably at several hundred thousand c, or boost themselves to up to several trillion c at the cost of damage to their engines. Without 4D movement capabilities, or the ability to make really, really, really big explosions, you can't even touch them. Their FTL is no joke either, giving them access to a whole fourth dimension in which to move. However, they can read things with effectors up to several thousand lightyears away, iirc, which gives them some pretty good information-gathering capabilities. Effectors are capable of swamping Earth's EM spectrum with whatever it wanted from beyond Betelgeuse (over 600 lightyears away), while fine manipulations typically require it to be closer. If they can't, their systems trip a self-destruct sequence that instantly vaporizes the ship. They use this to subvert enemy ships by hijacking their Minds (more on that later) to be friendly to them, and their countermeasures consist of the ship using its own effectors to undo the damage faster than the enemy ship can. The latter system is called the Trapdoor system, and with it, one is capable of setting a nuke off next to someone and not having them notice.Īlong with Displacers (the wormhole teleporters) and the multi-lightyear range at which they engage in combat, they hold the advantage of effectors, which are capable of rewiring and rewriting both mechanical and biological systems alike (like brains or enemy AI). Culture ships trade fire by using wormholes to teleport collapsed antimatter or plasma charges onto enemy ships, which are countered by the enemy ship using its own wormhole teleportation to shunt the explosive mass out of the ship. Supernovae, black holes, and white holes are the only things mentioned that could actually damage a Culture ship, but it has ways to handle all of them (namely FTL-ing away for the first, and just not running into them for the latter two). There are no natural phenomenon that can threaten a Culture ship, with them being able to comfortably sit under the surface of a star as a tactic to hide themselves from their enemies.
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