The Ethical Issues Concerning The Athanor Mining Laser Firing Sequence

 

'What if this thing were used where life already exists..?'

Question asked by the media during the Upwell Consortium press conference announcing the Athanor-class refinery station during YC119

A while ago I docked in one of our Athanors in the Gamis system to prepare for a mining operation the following morning, so for the first time ever I would be present when an Athanor fired its mining laser in order to perform the controlled break-up of the 'moon chunk' that it had spent several days tractoring off the surface.

This is a novelty to me as I am a casual miner, almost a hobbyist. I don't even really do anything with the ore that I mine - I sell it to the alliance through their buyback scheme or dump it on the open market. Sometimes I might even build something with it out of curiosity.

I've never checked the specs for the Athanor laser and determined just how powerful it actually is, but one must assume at least equivalency with the Doomsday weapons in a Titan, because we're talking about the ability to almost-instantly shatter a chunk of moon crust that will mass several million tons. It would take a fleet of Ventures months to do what the laser does in a few seconds.

I was in the control room for the operation. The mining boss simply pushes a button and then the station does everything else automatically, which is probably safer than allowing humans, especially capsuleers, any interference in the 'signal path'.

The laser takes a few seconds to charge up, which, if you're a capsuleer with implants that enhance your perception of the world around you, means you can detect the various vibrations and noises that the station starts producing during the charging process that are infrasonic and ultrasonic and just beyond a baseliner's awareness. It can be unnerving if you're not expecting it. Then the lights dim slightly as all the station's power is diverted to the laser that would be called a weapon if it was used against something other than inert rock.

Then there is a blinding flash from the laser and all that energy hits the rock and turns it into a ball of fire. It's visceral, all that power, the power of a sun generated right here in the station.

The rock shatters into thousands of pieces, the smallest pieces vaporised, the bigger chunks rapidly cool in the hard vac and become ISK symbols.

But then it's not over! The laser shifts modes and fires pulses at the moon, cannon shots no less, causing a new moon chunk to become available to be tractored off the surface.   

The cycle repeats. 

The ISK must flow... 

The process is amazing to watch; it's fascinating and even enjoyable.

But it's also pure environmental terrorism. I mean, what's stopping some rogue capsuleer group from putting one of these above a terrestrial and ransoming the entire planet? OK, I know, there has to be a Moon Mining Beacon and you have to be above a barren moon to establish one of those beacons. But those are bureaucratic regulations.

In this age of 'Emergent Threats', of Drifters, Triglavians, Trig-sympathiser groups (for whom God will reserve special judgement), Matari and Fed and State militant groups, Amarrian heretics, isn't it only a matter of time before somebody tries this? If I've thought of it...

If you think I'm talking dreck, may I remind you of what happened last year with the Kahah III Atrocity? A Titan in highsec using an illegal cyno..?

Need I say more..?

OK enough of the apocalyptic doom-mongering. Here are some more Athanor Mining Laser Shot shots from our Athanor in Syndicate. The fireworks!

That is a terrible weapon right there...

All Roads Lead to Khanid, Part II: Poacher Turned Gamekeeper

The Trailing L5 Point Behind Ibani V, in the Ibani System in 'Cabeki Pocket' aka The Budar Constellation, Khanid - 12/5/119, 1105 hrs

I left the wormhole, because my work there was done.

Shortly afterwards, I left Signal Cartel, because my work there was done too.

It was a sudden thing. In the wormhole, over the course of a single day, I came to a series of realisations about my own ethical stance towards exploring Sleeper and Talocan archaeological relics.

In the wormhole, I'd seen enough, done enough, to know that I could no longer tolerate those archaeological relics and paleo-technological artifacts that I saw there, being plundered, ransacked, stripped, and stolen by capsuleers, all looking to make a quick and dirty profit by taking this stuff to a trade hub and selling it to some collector or industrialist, in return for a bunch of non-existent digital fiat currency that has no intrinsic value in the real world. Plundering those sites, when they actually need to be studied and learned from.

Studied, not sold.

A new, overall awareness arrived in my conscience like a beam laser through my forehead: if I can stop just one of those looters, then one fewer looters out there could make all the difference to understanding what the Sleepers and Talocan were, and to understanding the Drifter threat. It could be me that finds that piece of data that explains where they went and what they were (and are), instead of that data being found by some 'explorer' who doesn't stop to understand the significance of it, and goes on to flog it to some collector who doesn't give a shit, puts it on a shelf and leaves it there, forever undiscovered; or some industrialist who recycles it and turns it into something else, something designed to limit human knowledge rather than expand it.

I have the means to stop looters in their tracks. It is time to use Empress of Amarr as it was designed to be used: not as a ship of peace, but as a protector of a technological faith. It is made of Sleeper tech. It is part of what they were.

So I made the move. I locked the doors to my quarters in the citadel, resigned from Signal Cartel and re-emerged from the wormhole, back into New Eden.

There was just one corporation I wanted to move to.

To return to.

Outdated Host Productions - [PHP1] - the corporation I first joined when I left Hedion University, dozens of lifetimes ago.

I opened [PHP1]'s public channel and reached out. I got a swift and welcoming response, as I knew I would. I'd left on excellent terms 500 days earlier, and it was like I'd never been away. I had missed the Big K and its mostly-uninhabited lowsec 'pipe' that I had re-visited precisely once during my time in Signal Cartel. I missed the calming presence of The Cauldron in my cam drones' synthetic imaging algorithms. I missed Borgin's one-liners and Crystalline's urbane wit and elocution and passion for post-op cuisine. I even missed Jzma and Mechoj's turbulent leadership style (although I found since I rejoined that both are no-longer prominent in the Darwinism alliance now).

I missed the dulcet tones of Sul Glass, Bishop of the Seevadin Constellation - his ongoing doctrinal schism with Amarrian Orthodoxy alive and well (Sec Status -7.6) - now leader of Darwinism, which means Darwinism itself is guided from above. It was all the same old crew: Garen, Gettosmurf, Madrocks and Endiir, all still there like a universal constant (Endiir, what happened to those dreads man??).

Some other names I remembered had moved on since I was last in [PHP1], but that core foundation was still present.

All was well with the universe.

I considered the sudden and radical nature of my personal course-change once again while lobbing massive destruction at somebody's industrial facility today in Ibani - somebody I've never met, never even heard of.

It's about interests and objectives and how they align organically with those of others.

It's how and why, in the cam drone stills you can see here, I'm jacked into a stealth bomber as part of a fleet asserting Darwinism's presence in Khanid.

It's part of my job now, and I like it.

You might wonder how it is possible to live with what outwardly appears to be a complete 180-degree reversal of principle that comes with moving from a pacifism-oriented service corporation, to returning to a corporation that practices piracy and does crimes. The answer is in the principle itself and how it led to the realisation I arrived at that day in the wormhole: I never totally believed in the feasibility of Signal Cartel's pacifist policy in the first place; I just went along with it because it served my purpose to do so for as long as I wanted to stay there. My time in Signal Cartel was overwhelmingly positive, but now its core policy would become an impediment to the preservationist stance that I was about to take up, and as Signal Cartel itself states, if you can't abide by the credo, you can't stay.

I could no-longer abide...

I've left friends behind in Signal Cartel (on good terms, I hope), but progress and change and evolution are the dominant forces in the universe and resistance is futile (where have I heard that before..?).

There is nothing new about any of it. I'm just doing what humanity has always done: looked after number one. But I'm also looking to preserve knowledge.

Explorers: I'm coming for you now...

Sotiyo

The entire economy of the State is predicated on three assumptions: that the State's resources are infinite; that as a result there is infinite capacity for population growth within the State; therefore there is infinite capacity for economic growth within the State. All three of those conditions are knowingly false, but you try telling them that.

Munorina Quevari - Business Series #24, Hedion University Guest Lecturer Series Holovid Archives

Our wormhole has spent the last few days in the Republic.

By the time you read this, it will have gone somewhere else. Anyone who lives in a wormhole will know this is entirely normal, as is the bizarre terminology itself - we don't live in a wormhole, we live in a planetary system in the Anoikis Cluster that is accessed through a pseudo-randomly occurring wormhole. I still believe these things are being controlled from somewhere, but there remains no evidence of of this beyond the statistical patterns of manifestation. I believe it, and I'm sticking to it, because belief is all I have in that place.

Belief is my greatest defence.

Against them.

Anyway, our wormhole manifested separately in Heimatar, Molden Heath and Metropolis. It's last few manifestations have been highly karmic, as the wormhole has appeared in incredibly convenient locations for resupplying our citadel.

When the wormhole was in Molden Heath, we were one stargate jump away from the minor, tertiary trade hub in the Teonusude system, so I jumped over to it to obtain some consumables: ammo, reconnaissance and scanning equipment, ship components (ships lead very hard lives in wormholes), cutting-edge holovids, decent coffee, and other catering supplies that are not illegal in space that has no security status.

In that system, there is also a Sotiyo Engineering Complex, which, as is common these days, is openly competing with the established trade hub, to the point where I actually ended up docking there instead of the hub. It's all about the tax breaks and the brokerage fees. This has become such a thing over the last year that both economic and actual warfare has broken out between capsuleers over it in the State, as well it might in that capitalist hell-hole - that monument to the myth of endless economic growth. I live in a wormhole now, so it all seems so juvenile and futile.

So anyway, the real point of this journal is that I've never seen a Sotiyo complex before in the flesh/metal, so I thought I'd document it. These are the biggest structures that the well shady Upwell Consortium produces and I wanted to find out how tall the letters are in the logo on its outer hull. What stood out about this one was that its owners must have had a developed sense of scenery when it came to selecting its location.

When I saw it, it was on the dark side of the moon it orbited. Since Molden Heath in general is as dark as the hearts of the tribal masses that administer it, the Sotiyo and its war machine seemed completely appropriate here, surrounded by all that blood-red nebulosity.

It's always difficult to get a sense of scale in space. With structures like this, your Overview and its distance readouts seem to play tricks on your mind. A Sotiyo is so damned big because it is designed to house capital ships inside it. It would take a week to walk from one side of it to the other. You could even fit President Jacus Roden's ego in it. There are so many docking bays that it's impossible to see the big picture when you're in one.

In any case, the wormhole's clock was ticking. Someone in our comms channel mentioned the term 'EOL' - End Of Life - imminent expiry within a couple of hours. I did the trading I needed to do from within my Prorator's capsule by staying jacked-in, got all the cargo loaded on board, and departed, back to the hole, back to the dreamworld. 

I doubt that 'Sotiyo', one half of the Caldari inventors of the Sotiyo-Urbaata Jump Drive that was the prototype of warp drives used throughout the whole of New Eden today, ever imagined that his name would be on the side of a giant space station, over half a millennium later.

Or maybe he did - Caldari corporate megalomania and all that.

And now, this last week, I heard about Upwell's development of a new type of 'refinery' installation that will be able to detach a piece of a moon's crust and tractor it bodily into orbit, where it can be fragmented into a temporary small-scale asteroid belt and set upon by squadrons of mining lasers. There is an inherent laziness to this technique that is tantamount to environmental terrorism. Speaking of terrorism, it wouldn't be too much of a leap for a capsuleer's imagination to think of using this scorched-earth mining technique as a weapon against an inhabited terrestrial - a grand extortionist's greatest achievement.

The universe is going mad.

Where will it end?

This Is Your Nightmare Scenario

Long story/short version: our Citadel in Ashmarir was attacked again, this time by a combination of CVA and Volition Cult and some other stragglers/bit-part players whose names are basically irrelevant, because they're all singing from the same hymnsheet that never ends.

CVA/Volition's fleet was much larger than last time, and their tactics included positioning some of it on the Ashmarir - Claini stargate in an attempt to intercept us lot as we were inbound from Gehi. It was a disturbing sight:

This abomination is a fleet of Nightmares. Hideous ex-Sansha's Nation battleships, designed to instil horror in the onlooker and normally crewed - although unlikely in this case - by Kuvakei's minions whose lifestyle makes Amarrian slaves appear spontaneous and unpredictable. This fleet will have been crewed by capsuleers and God-knows what else. It's an indication of how far removed from baseline some capsuleers must be.

Twice I saw neutral vessels arrive in-system through the stargate and be confronted with this situation. I empathised with those ships' crews, because there are gate camps and there is blatant overkill. This is why I have no future in piracy.

The worst bit was witnessing this obscenity depart the stargate en-masse, the entire fleet aligning simultaneously with millisecond precision, as if the ships were not even manned; as if they were relentless automata controlled by a hive mind with the patience of geology:

This sort of thing is liable to turn one religious again. I must be cleansed of this sight. Does anyone know what the plural noun for Nightmares is?

Party in Ashmarir: Darwinism vs CVA

Curatores Veritatis Alliance, well-known Amarr loyalists and self-styled Gatekeepers of Providence, came out of nowhere this week and attacked our new Citadel in the Ashmarir system.

This wasn't all we've had to put up with this week, what with the ongoing personal vendetta of Musashibou Benkei - the Renegade of Khanid - and his ex-Bergmann/ex-Darwinism followers that all have the attention spans of children.

Politics...

Back on topic: Ashmarir is one of the gateway systems to the soon-to-be-established Independent Empyrean Republic of Khanidistan. It is at the 'east' end of Khanid Lowsec and is otherwise an unremarkable system with no mainstream stations, three uninhabited terrestrials (uninhabited as far as can be determined, although you can never rule out uncharted pockets of madness, survivalism, religious extremism and hermitry), and token capsuleer industry based around a handful of resource-poor moons.

Ashmarir is not that big a deal, or at least it wasn't until we put our Citadel there.

Earlier this week, a CVA fleet manifested in Ashmarir and attacked our Citadel. We left them to it because of the Citadel's ability to withstand an initial assault. CVA made their statement and left.

We had 24 hours to prepare for their return.

When they returned, we were ready in ways we've never been before. In other words, we put some thought into it instead of winging it. The ultra-reliable Lowsechnaya Sholupen also showed up to assist us on the premise of any excuse for a party.

We were outnumbered at least 2-1 by CVA , but we still repelled them because we had Dreads and they didn't. Check out the cam drone stills and telemetry below.

FACE-OFF!

 

IT BEGINS!

APOSTLES!

[DRWIN] & [LSH] KICKS [CVA] ASS!!

CVA WITHDRAWS!

SALVAGE OPERATION AFTERWARDS

I hate to gloat, but we did in fact cane CVA and force them to withdraw.

We won.

Noteworthy: Lowsechnaya deployed some examples of the new Apostle-class Force Auxiliary ship - the new paradigm in capital starship combat. I never saw one in the flesh before so I never appreciated how damned big they are. I mention the Apostle because the Imperial Fleet's naval architects went to the trouble of designing the Apostle with armour that depicts a stylized mural of the 'Martyrdom Of Empress Jamyl At Safizon by the Drifters'.

A design statement like that is only ever about propaganda rather than operational requirement, so there is intense irony here in that we used Apostles against an Amarr loyalist alliance. Few other capsuleers involved in this skirmish would have given this issue a moment's consideration, but I look for stuff like this, which is why the idea of CVA's motivation for this attack was, to use a Ni-Kunni idiom, filling my head with sand.

As Darwinism's media & PR rep, I thought about asking them. I fired off some comms; as and when I get a response from them, I'll update this post. I'm not holding my breath though...

Until then, it's Darwinism 1 - CVA 0.

* * * 

[PHP1] is recruiting! Seriously, we're in a bit of a golden age at the moment and are experiencing a recruitment surge. Not just that, I woke up today and found out that [FCON] are our allies. When did that happen??

Size Matters And Don't Ever Forget It

"That's no moon, that's a space station"

Unknown - Jovian Historical Codex

I'm content to play a peripheral role in Darwinism's ambitions for political autonomy in Khanid. However the ongoing incongruity of being a pacifist in an alliance whose principal objective is piracy is a bit problematic. I'm an artist, not a warrior. It will have been noted that I don't do criminality (although there is a slippery slope - more on that anon), but it's not like I do nothing; for example this journal is Darwinism's principal media outlet, plus there are the freight runs I participate in that generate most of [PHP1]'s income - although at the time of this writing that's on hold as we're being 'wardecced' again because PIRAT's clock-face mentality means the hands of their 'clock' are once again pointing at us (a stopped clock is right twice per day). Yesterday, previous seasonal antagonists Marmite Collective even offered to fight the 'deccers on our behalf. What the hell is that all about??

I'm also developing [PHP1]'s trading policy in the Tash-Murkon region, and it seems to be working better than I expected. I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's remarkable how much more vibrant and active the region is in contrast to Khanid, which, at least from the capsuleer's perspective, is economically moribund and stagnant. Worryingly so in fact.

It's such a radical difference that I'm in the process of shifting most of my personal interests from the chilled out backwater of Danera to Tash-Murkon Prime. I just can't ignore the possibilities therein any longer. This is the fork in the road I was on about last time. The fact that the incoming Empress is also from T-M  is just a coincidence (no it isn't, not really, I just want some of Catiz's profit motive to rub off on me).

I digress again...

In other news (Ape Daily News: it's a thing now), we've built at least two of Upwell Corporation's new Citadels right here in Khanid. One of them is orbiting a terrestrial world deep within the Khanid interior where the renegade Musashibou Benkei will never find it. What a sight this thing must be from the planet's surface:

Our other Citadel is in a much more prominent location and was ceremonially visited last week by another Avatar that I didn't even know we had. Note to self: keep in touch with leadership more often - get them to send me stuff etc.. The Avatar belongs to [DRWIN] newcomers Local Spike:

So there are at least two Khanid Titans and two Citadels here. This means we've got at least as many Citadels as Lowsechnaya - I've seen two of theirs in Aridia - and because these things are appearing all over the place then it means one's corporation is nothing unless one has one (CE are you reading this?). The fact that the thing is brand new and is so big that vast tracts of its interior will as yet go unused and consequently you could walk for kilometres without seeing anyone else, is irrelevant. It's worth having one just to see the magic tethering beam work. It reaches out and grabs you as if to rescue you from the bleak indifference of the void.

But only if you're on our side...

[PHP1] is recruiting!