User:The Collective Mind/Prototypes

!!ALERT!!
PRIORITY RED MESSAGE

FROM: Prime Analyst (11:18): Travat Petrushov, Asken [Legions: Intelligence/Alien]

TO: Sector 11 Intelligence Director: Anaya Kiril, Toboloi [Legions: Intelligence/Alien]

SUBJECT: IRON AXIS threat capacity review

TAGS: IRON AXIS, threat level, allies...

MESSAGE BEGINS.

Sir Kiril, I fear we have severely underestimated the threat capacity of IRON AXIS.

Earlier today (cycle 05-12), reconnaissance fleet T490-11:18 clandestinely entered IRON AXIS space outside Sector 11 to observe Channel operations and IRON AXIS activities in and around system AY/1787. AY/1787 was believed to be a major IRON AXIS population center based on intercepted comms traffic and hyperspace activity (attached: AY/1787, Stellar Activity, 599 03-01).

It appears that most of what we know about IRON AXIS is built on faulty evidence.

The asteroid habitats within joint Imperial-IRON AXIS space seem to be no more than a manned perimeter, a buffer zone for potential threats. What the recon fleet discovered was an actual IRON AXIS city. Look at this:

This is AY/1787:08, the smallest of the eight planets in the system. All of them were like this. This represents an astral engineering capacity millennia beyond our capabilities. They're taking the whole planet apart.

Attached is a full report on IRON AXIS activities and construction within the AY/1787 system. To summarize: From the scale of this project, the sheer amount of resources involved, and the fact that no Monitors are present, we must assume that the AY/1787 project is not unusual for IRON AXIS. It may even be routine. Espionage Officer (11:18) Kol is organizing another reconnaissance operation to probe deeper into IRON AXIS space to confirm. Target stars are UY/2410, UD/0122, and AY/4415.
 * AY/1787 is covered by an incomplete stellar shell, made up of an estimated 72576 solar collection satellites.
 * Extensive celestial demolition in progress; AY/1787:03 estimated to be fully dismantled within 4 years.
 * No fewer than five Channel nodes present. Channel activity 864% greater than previously estimated average.
 * Orbital habitats:
 * 3 confirmed Class 4 (metropolis+), 1 unconfirmed
 * 33 confirmed Class 3 (metropolis-scale), 58 unconfirmed.
 * 70 confirmed Class 2 (city-scale), 119 unconfirmed.
 * 284 confirmed Class 1 (colony-scale), 537 unconfirmed.
 * 8 new IRON AXIS starship types, apparently specialized for planet-dismantling/megastructure-construction purposes.
 * No Monitors detected.

Based on the findings of T490-11:18, I humbly submit that IRON AXIS should be reclassified to Threat Level 2. I await your response, Sir Kiril.

Prime Analyst Asken Travat Petrushov

MESSAGE ENDS.

GLORY TO THE EMPIRE - LONG LIVE THE TETRARCHS

Intro
"They don't understand what "go around" means. They have plans, and anything in the way of those plans gets pounded until it isn't."

- Ambassador Traskya Polemitya Travat, United Bidonite Empire

Of all the civilizations in the galaxy, few are as single-mindedly driven as Motive.

Some have described Motive as "industrialism gone mad." While this is an understandable conclusion, nothing could be further from the truth. The problem is this: very few cultures have quite the same fixity of purpose as Motive, the same relentless and remorseless focus. Without similar clarity, most civilizations have difficulty comprehending Motive's utter straight-edge sanity. Perhaps a better description would be "Motive is industrialism taken to its logical extreme," where there is no purpose to industry but industry itself: a tautological ouroboros, endlessly consuming resources to find more resources to consume.

Society
"Motive is the most thoroughly joyless society I have ever had the dubious pleasure of studying."

- Oraxes Merl, Necrox Commonwealth (Biotic Catalogue)

To understand Motive, one must first understand the Monitors.

Motive, in its most basic form, exists as an extension of the Monitors. It is the means by which the Monitors accumulate power and consolidates their grip on the galaxy, an enormous support structure with the sole purpose of carrying out the Monitors' will. If the Monitors are the brain, then Motive is the hand.

As such, Motive only cares about its populace in terms of obedience, control, and productivity. The most zealous police states can make their lowest classes into gray and indifferent chattel, but only in Motive is the entire population composed of such menials. From the bottom-most factory worker to the highest authority of the Terminals, the Motivators are uniformly exploited and exhausted, slowly drained to feed the Monitors' relentless hunger for more: more planets, more resources, more industry. They live by the clock and the quota, the productivity-enhancing medication and the threat of removal. Every movement is tracked, every infraction logged, every failure punished. No one is too important to replace.

Only production matters. All other concerns are secondary. This is a cult of industry. Motive builds no statues because memorializing the past is irrelevant; Motive looks to the present and the future. Motive makes no art because art distracts from productivity. Motive does not write literature unless it is useful. Motive does not make music, or encourage culture, or care at all about the living masses that drive its engines and machinery, except when it serves the Monitors to do so.

There are exceptions, of course, as there are exceptions to rules in all stellar empires. Sometimes these things do serve the Monitors. Motive can make use of anything. Its factories, so well-used for industry, can easily be retasked to churn out beautiful things in endless quantities. Motive receives a constant undercurrent of income (in the form of raw materials, the only payment it accepts) from selling and renting goods to other civilizations, ranging from simple industrial machinery to gigantic atmosphere-conversion terraformers.

sea mauville

"One of my friends heard from a Motivator that the Monitors get weirder the deeper inside you go. Things like the corridors changing when you aren't looking, weird sounds, rooms that don't make sense... he heard the pipes and the wires start looking like writing, when you get far enough."

Organization
Motive's civilian organization is intensely complicated, having more in common with a corporate hierarchy than any proper system of government. Motive is generally considered to be an oligarchic federation, with a few political theorists maintaining that it should also be classified as a theocracy.

The Monitors are at the top of the pyramid. All authority within Motive is ultimately derived from them. They lodge production orders, authorize projects, and generally control everything that goes on within Motive, including all matters of interstellar governance. It is the Motivator's job to carry out the orders they issue.

Intrastellar government, meanwhile, is all handled by the Motivators. Motive's basic unit of government is the junction -- a colonized star system. Every junction is a node in Motive's galactic wormhole network, a partially self-governing state with its own administrative hierarchy, jurisdiction, and general autonomy, though the Monitors still hold absolute power over them.

Junctions are divided into a variable number of sectors, analogous to a federated state in a less obsessive government, and each sector in turn has its own sub-sectors. This is done purely for ease of organization; all sectors are identical in every respect save quantity and positioning. Each has its own production centers, worker habitats, starports, administrative hierarchies, etc.

Overall junction governance is undertaken by a Junction Administrator, the highest non-Monitor authority within Motive. A Junction Sub-Administrator is assigned to every sector within a junction, maintaining the various functions of each.

As for those functions... A separate military command structure exists in parallel with the civilian hierarchy, and is roughly as convoluted.
 * Director of Operations: resource efficiency, quality control, international relations
 * Operations Managers: establish production quotas, organizational efficiency, diplomatic affairs
 * Chief Workforce Officer: employment control, labor tasking, discipline
 * Compliance Officers: ensure all industrial processes and products comply with Motive regulations
 * Director of Production: quota enforcement, project management, scientific innovation
 * Chief Science Officer: oversees scientific projects and laboratories
 * Project Managers: oversee project performance, ensure production quotas are reached
 * Director of Logistics: resource movement and acquisition
 * Chief Distribution Officer: manage resource distribution across Motive factories, habitats, etc.
 * Survey Officers: locate and log resource nodes for future exploitation
 * Chief Development Officer: authorization and management of resourcing operations
 * Director of Infrastructure: construction and expansion
 * Senior Construction Managers: oversee construction of new junction structures
 * Chief Infrastructure Officer: oversee maintenance and repair of junction structures
 * Director of Labor
 * Chief Population Officer: population production, genetic documentation
 * Chief Provisioning Officer: food/water supply, medication, tools of all sorts
 * Civilian Affairs Administrator: housing assignment, complaints handling, transportation, etc.

Motive is technically a meritocracy, in that competency determines one's advancement. However, promotion is not a reward, and frequently occurs because the person ahead of you proved inadequate and was subsequently removed. As one's authority grows, so do the consequences of failure. The Monitors do not tolerate failure.

Technology
"Why do the Monitors need so many people? They have the technology to automate everything for a quarter of the cost and ten times the output. Why do they still use people?"

- Analyst Shuykim Auv, Imperial Intelligence

Other civilizations may surpass Motive in size, but few can match it in sheer industrial capacity. Other civilizations have luxuries and liberties. Motive, on the other hand, is geared entirely towards the gathering and processing of raw materials. And to Motive, everything is raw material. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can certainly be transmuted into other forms, which means mass is as ripe for exploitation as any other solid resource.

Matter conversion
The Matter-Conversion Forge forms the core of Motive's resourcing operations. The MCF is a crude but effective form of molecular assembler capable of converting matter into energy and back again, with a wholly new atomic structure. This allows Motive to turn otherwise-useless materials such as shale or dirt into more useful forms, like metal and plastic.

This atomic transmutation is not wholly efficient. The process loses some of the energy as heat, so a corresponding amount of the original matter is lost as well. Still, the ability to make inert mass into viable supply remains extremely useful to Motive, allowing it to make the most of any given astronomical body. It would be a post-scarcity civilization if only its people were allowed to enjoy its resources.

The MCF is also limited in that it cannot (yet) replace conventional manufacturing techniques. It is only capable of changing matter from one form to another, and cannot assemble that matter into new shapes, or produce more than one kind of matter at once. In other words, it can only create raw material; finished goods still require all the usual in-between assembly.

Megascale engineering
Motive does not believe in colonies.

In the philosophy of Motive, planets, moons, and asteroids exist to be exploited; and by "exploited", Motive means "completely dismantled." The MCF means that all their available mass can be utilized, not simply their extant natural resources. Why deal with things like terraforming and gravity when you can just take the offending planet apart? Centuries of practice have given rise to a vast selection of brutal planetary-disassembly tools and techniques. Every star system under Motive's control is scarred by its quarrying operations. Motive has made even the destruction of planets routine.

The resources acquired from such operations are rapidly put to use in construction and manufacturing. In particular, rather than settle planetoids like other civilizations, Motive builds colossal orbital installations to house its population. The structural stability of these megastructures stems from the usage of certain ultra-strong materials in their construction, which Motive is only able to mass-produce through MCF technology.

Dyson shells are abundant within Motive space, required to satisfy the immense power needs of its industry. In addition to conventional solar power, the Solar Collection Stations are also responsible for the manufacture of antimatter via pair production.

Channel network
Wormhole transportation is not uncommon for sufficiently advanced civilizations, but like everything else, Motive takes it to an extreme.

Inter-Orbital Channel gates are enormous constructions capable of forming and sustaining artificial wormholes indefinitely once "synchronized" to a second gate, creating a tunnel through space between the two points. Wormhole travel allows Motive to travel interstellar distances at intergalactic speeds, far greater than their hyperspace technology allows. Any given Channel gate can link to any other gate, given enough time and power. For the most part, however, Motive prefers its gates to have permanent links. This, along with the sheer volume of Channel gates in Motive possession (every junction maintains at least one connection; highly developed junctions may maintain over a dozen), allows for the transportation of resources and materiel between systems with unprecedented efficiency.

A few Channel gates exist outside of direct Motive control, rented to other nations in exchange for a steady tribute of resources. The costs are said to be ruinous. But the value of having a portable and semi-permanent wormhole in your possession probably makes up for that.

Terminals
The culmination of all of the above technology, the Terminal is what every Motive junction aspires to become.

A Terminal is to a junction the same way a capital city is to a country suburb. All available mass is utilized and repurposed into an ugly web of metal and industry stretching across the solar system. Dozens of Channel gates bring in a constant influx of resources to feed Terminal factories. Hundreds of billions of Motivators populate its depths, marching ceaselessly through its corridors, toiling endlessly in the smog. Whole generations live and die within its confines. This is a glimpse of the galaxy as Motive wants it remade.

The ultimate purpose of the Terminal is to bring forth a newborn Monitor, clad in metal. Every Monitor has a home Terminal: the seat of its power, responsible for its resupply, repair, and reconstruction should it be destroyed.

It takes centuries for a Motive settlement to be declared a Terminal. In the tens of thousands of star systems under Motive control, only a few hundred are Terminals, and even fewer have a patron Monitor.

Chemistry
Aside from its brutal industrial muscle, Motive is also known for its exceptional understanding of chemistry, especially in relation to biology. Performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals play a major role in the exploitation of its constituents. Fatigue-reducers allow Motivators to work well past their circadian limits. Attention-enhancers give them hyperfocus on their duties. Mood stabilizers bring divergent tendencies in line. Libido suppressants prevent unauthorized reproduction. Even their advanced antibiotics only exist because disease curtails productivity.

This can and has been weaponized, as truth serums, disciplinary hallucinogens, and other, more insidious agents. Motive's understanding of biochemistry is such that it can easily adapt these medications for use on virtually any carbon-based lifeform, given a few specimen dissections (or vivisections) to deduce the specifics of their biology.

Military
"They’ll kill the planet. They’ll toxiform it. They’ll pump it full of their toxins and their smog. The corrosive rain -- lakes full of effluence -- poisonous mud deep enough to suck you down without a trace -- that’s what they’ll do. Everywhere they fight, they don’t just kill the enemy. They kill the ground beneath them too."

Motive doesn't care much for war. Other civilizations throw themselves into battle full of patriotism and cheer, or perhaps outrage and hatred. Not Motive. Motive fights like fighting is just another job, no different from assembly work or construction. War is simply one of many obstacles to overcome in its grand plan, and like every other obstacle it encounters, Motive has developed a wide range of tools for taking it apart.

Sound-bombs
Noise is Motive's most infamous and most commonly employed weapon. Motive has discovered a particular sound, a particular noise, that has exceptionally deleterious effects on almost all carbon-based lifeforms. Its infrasonic vibrations cause severe internal bleeding and widespread organ failures, not least of which in the brain -- the noise destroys the mind as well as the body. Those who have heard it and survived describe it as arrhythmic cacophony.

Motive has learned how to harness the noise into its so-called "sound-bombs". Exactly how the bomb functions is a closely guarded secret, and the bomb tends to destroy itself over the course of its short operation. Regardless, the sound-bomb (which varies in size from "hand grenade" to "starship missile") is able to generate the noise across a period of several seconds, killing or incapacitating everyone within its effective radius. Motive is not immune to the effects of its own bombs.

The noise can only be generated physically -- no recording, regardless of fidelity, provokes the effects of the original. Captured sound-bombs refuse to activate outside of Motive hands. Necrox scientists believe there is a psychic component involved in the bomb's operation; given that Motivators appear to be uniformly non-psychic or even anti-psychic, how this can be possible remains a mystery.

The purpose of the sound-bomb is threefold. First, it serves as an effective area denial weapon with no obvious effective range; a sensible enemy quickly learns to detour very far around an active bomb. Second, it is a weapon of terror, demoralizing enemy combatants; there is a special sort of horror in a weapon designed to destroy the mind, leaving an empty shell behind. Third, it serves to drain enemy resources, forcing them to expend time and effort caring for brain-damaged or vegetative soldiers.

As sound is very difficult to protect oneself against, the sound-bomb makes for a truly dangerous weapon. There are downsides, however.
 * 1) First, the bomb takes a precious handful of seconds to activate, allowing sufficiently agile people a brief window of time to destroy it before it begins full operation.
 * 2) Second, the effects of the bomb drop off sharply with distance, having an effective range with a much shorter radius than conventional explosives -- where someone would suffer shrapnel wounds or blast injuries, here they will only suffer nausea and debilitation.
 * 3) Third, as sound travels through vibration, atmospheric density plays a large role in the bomb's effectiveness. The thinner the atmosphere, the shorter the bomb's range; in space, the bomb is entirely useless unless it physically impacts another ship.
 * 4) Fourth, the bomb is useless against robots and non-carbon-based life. Motive has other ways to deal with those.

Ion pulse cannon
Motive's trump card and the source of the Monitors' reputation as fleet-killers, the ion pulse cannon is an ion weapon of incredible size. Like other ion weapons, it fires a burst of ionized particles capable of disrupting ship systems and shutting down electronics, much like an EMP weapon. Unlike other ion weapons, the ion pulse cannon fires in a single, massive, omnidirectional pulse, unleashing an expanding sphere of charged particles to envelop every ship within range. No amount of maneuvering in realspace can evade the blast, unless one flies directly away from the pulse fast enough to escape it. The weapon leaves ships of all sizes dead in space, vulnerable to the missile barrage that inevitably follows.

Fortunately for prospective enemies, the ion pulse cannon is only mounted on Monitor-class vessels, which also appear to be the only Motive ships capable of withstanding the blast -- the weapon is truly indiscriminate. It is also possible to "dodge" the pulse by jumping into hyperspace before the wave arrives and re-emerging behind it, though attempting such a short-range jump has its own inherent hazards. The main weakness of the ion pulse cannon, however, is the simple fact that its omnidirectional nature means the particles constituting its discharge spread out over a distance, rendering it increasingly less effective as range increases.

Hyperspace mines
The hyperspace mine is a mainstay of Motive's defensive technology. Its construction is extremely simple, amounting to little more than an anti-capital-ship antimatter charge mounted to a hyperspace drive. Their operation is equally simple: when the mine detects a hyperdrive signature that does not match Motive frequencies, it activates its own hyperdrive and propels itself directly towards the offending ship like a guided missile.

This simplicity has its drawbacks. While the mines are hard to spoof and harder to spot, they are also very easy to detect once activated, and can just as easily be destroyed at a safe distance by point defenses. They are, however, seeded by the millions throughout Motive space, and any hostile force trying to move through that space will be facing a near-endless stream of mines hurtling towards them, each one of which is capable of leveling mountains. And mixed in with the explosives are a certain number of mines primed only with electromagnetic chaff, designed to burst and fill detection systems with a haze of false readings.

Motive's hyperspace mines are very much a "fire and forget" weapon. Besides being self-guided, they can also remain dormant for an indefinite length of time in the best manner of land mines everywhere. Should Motive desire to bring a foreign ship into its territory, its warships are capable of remotely (and temporarily) neutralizing the mines in its path of travel. Enterprising vanguards attempt to copy the "disarm" signal at their own peril -- more authentication is required than a simple broadcast.

Strategy
Being an entirely spaceborne civilization, Motive does not usually waste effort trying to conquer enemy planets. It prefers to level enemy installations from a safe distance in orbit before descending to perform their usual planet-cracking business.

Should Motive be forced into a ground war, however, it prefers a strategy of "total fortification": making any territory it claims impenetrable behind an ever-expanding wall of bunkers, fortresses, artillery, and gun turrets. Normally, such a strategy would require an exorbitant amount of resources and an unparalleled organizational ability. Since Motive has an exorbitant amount of resources and the organizational ability to boot, it works out. To Motive, "overdoing" is just regular doing.

This also applies to the offensive. Its preferred response to a given threat is to apply industrial quantities of firepower to it until the threat ceases to threaten, along with everything else in a fifty-kilometer radius. Motive likes to be sure of things.

History
The exact history of Motive is a mystery, thanks to Motive's habit of revising internal records to suit its purposes. The most reliable accounts place its foundation somewhere between 800 and 1000 years ago, with the construction of the first Monitor. However, the Monitor's very construction indicates that Motive existed in some form before that date. This raises the question: did the Monitors co-opt Motive's leadership, or did the intelligence within the Monitors simply inhabit a newer, more physical form?

Either way, under the guidance of the Monitors, Motive flourished. It claimed star after star, spreading like an interstellar virus, breaking open asteroids and strip-mining every planet and moon it landed on. Technology improved. Mining operations slowly gave way to full-blown planetary deconstruction, and habitat ships were replaced by megastructures. Motive built the first of its Channel gates. As the Channel network grew, so did the Terminals. And as the Terminals spread, so arose new Monitors to guide Motive's development.