A Subtle Taste of the Tech Tree (1)

If you're a player seriously running ships by now, I figure you've at least once walked past your subordinates doing maintenance on them.

And if you watched, you'd see them scrubbing, greasing, and torquing things down like maniacs, every single day without fail.

Some of you might even be ex-military from heavy equipment or vehicle units — those guys take ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠one look and realize your crew is pushing harder than whatever you used to do, and that they run a full overhaul at minimum once a week.

So why the hell is it that intense? Well, like Earth Gaia Sprout Alliance said before — this world's base layer is SF, sure, but it's a fusion-punk setting where magic, psychic powers, divine beings, and sorcery all flat-out exist.

What do I mean by that?

The moment you slack off on maintenance even a little, an enemy fleet — or some mage hanging around near your base — slaps a curse on you that maximizes 'flaws,' and the instant your ship leaves port, it can get hit with the ultimate dirty play and disintegrate into scrap the second it hits vacuum. Just like the pic I posted.

Now, actually shredding a ship down to components like that takes a truly insane ritual circle, with high-tiIIIigh-level mages latching on in numbers ranging from a handful to dozens or even hundreds depending on the ship's size.

And ship engineers aren't ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠idiots either — they put their own countermeasures on the hull so that kind of mana or sorcery can't touch the shields.

But mages and sorcerers aren't sitting around idle either. Instead of direct destruction, they'll fire off curses that simply raise the failure probability of certain components —

Think of it as a mindless random debuff spam in game terms. So whether you like it or not, you grind that maintenance hard.

Oh, and that's not all — this universe has a weird quirk where meticulously maintaining your ship and equipment every single day actually raises their curse resistance.

To put it precisely: the world runs on a bizarre sorcerous logic where slacking on maintenance makes your ships and gear more susceptible to curses. That's why they do it. Yep.

Back when it was a game, this was just TMI floating around in tooltips so nobody cared. Looking at it now? It was a legit survival guide, for real.

Magic & Sorcery

-> Looks like an unstoppable, absolutely busted cheat on the surface, but its nature demands enormous quantities of sacrificial offerings, reagents, and 'mana.'

Now, mana does exist in reality, just like the 'qi' those murim novels go on about — but it is not an ordinary energy source.

If you had to classify it, it's something like ether or dark matter. The problem is that there is exactly one way to gather the stuff: a living person must draw it out of nature with their own hands. No exceptions.

Well, to be precise, using 'mana stones' — which you sometimes find on planets overflowing with the stuff — is one alternative.

But I figure you've all caught on already just from that much: because of these properties, casting magic on too broad a scale doesn't just exhaust mages and sorcerers —

it reverses the flow and drains their own qi until they die.

And the usual benchmark for 'broad scale' is within a planet's atmosphere.

By space-combat standards that's absurdly narrow, and the range is pathetically short. So no, it's not easy.

Even the incident Invincible mentioned — the pre-Rebellion battleship annihilation — was only possible by throwing an entire mage battalion directly under the Demonia Empire plus several million tons of mana stones extorted from fantasy-type planets into it, all at once.

And even with that meticulous preparation, auxiliary magic circles laid down in advance, and everything else — the price for killing one battleship was an entire mage battalion collapsing into a collective coma, and every last one of those millions of tons of mana stones degrading into plain, worthless rocks.

Anyway, since the risks are that clear-cut, you don't see sorcery or magic targeting capital ships very often in fleet battles.

Ah — the school colloquially known as the 'magic beam' is a different story, but that's a pure range + firepower all-in build that sacrificed everything else, so it's separate from the weird stuff I'm describing here.

So when do players normally use mages?

Like Deputy Adjutant showed off last time — as bodyguards or escort units, deployed as anti-personnel specialists.

Or else you batter politicians with hypnosis-brainwashing conditioning until they start acting friendly toward you.

Of course, if you bring mages to the table, your opponent prepares a counter for it too, so it's not exactly a cakewalk.

For reference, there is exactly one known way to solve every problem I listed above: the Outer Gods beloved by the Earth Alliance and the Babel Cult.

These things are stupidly powerful in their true bodies, and being magical entities themselves, they command ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠so much mana that a single planet's entire reserve wouldn't even register as a rounding error by comparison.

So those who contract with Outer Gods are largely free from the problems above, and can hold their own in space-scale combat without much trouble.

Of course, as the name suggests, by the moral standards of ordinary, decent humans, Outer Gods are vile as sin —

keep using them and they collect their price. And since they collect that price on their terms, the variance is insane: for one person it ends with a single kiss from a cute Outer God girl, while another has to sacrifice an entire planet just to barely unlock one ability.

On top of that, Outer Gods are picky as hell about who they choose, and there's a heavy luck factor — so honestly, just assume you'll never get one.