I Fought The Lore and....The Lore Won!

[Vetinari]

Recently I posted how humanity takes time to develop new weapons in a lore based galaxy and then 4 days later 6 new Ocellus Starports and Megaships galore were apparently manufactured and delivered 800 LY away within 4-5 days of a CG completing to get the materials to build them, way to shoot me down in flames fdev

So some consistency is needed and hopefully this thread will help us all. We will be able to clear massive obstacles and jump to conclusions like never before to somehow crowbar that lore in and keep it in.

So the lore for the above inconsistency is that obviously* the Starports were built well in advance and well on the way to WHN long before we 'delivered the materials' 800 LY away, that was to keep us occupied while they were moving them out of the bubble. Before that the whole 'find new meta-alloys' was also a long-con by the powers that be (AEGIS/CODE etc) to make us believe the later story, even though most people already knew WHN had barnacles.

Another poster spotted a similar anomaly...

Although from a lore perspective, I'm confused. Obviously megaships are self-propelled, and Ocellus starports are able to fit giant engines. But how in the world does a surface port get assembled overnight? The buildings are seemingly impervious to weapons fire and impacts. Are they just getting dropped from orbit?

err..a bit trickier this one....desperately trying....to keep lore...alive...err..OK I got it....no that's silly that wouldn't work.....ah right, now try this:

Obviously* this base was pre-built and staffed as well, probably under camouflage netting impervious to scanning or just buried underground in a landing pad type dock with enough 'soil' on top to deflect the scanner. it was staffed and all people placed in escape pods to be woken up at a certain time and re-activate the station and make it 'magically' appear. All ship scanners have been 'locked' from seeing it until a reset relog is done allowing the on-board system to update and show it.

See, if we just believe enough it all ties in and we can keep it alive...hopefully

*Disclaimer: for a given value of obviously

 

[Soron Silin]

With enough people, it is amazing how fast construction can be done.

Have you ever seen those TV shows doing home improvement over three days? The 60 minute ones are only painting and stuff, but the longer ones often do extensive remodeling. If you wanted to do that yourself it would take several months.

It wasn't just 4-5 days. They would have started as soon as the first materials arrived.

We were a tiny part of the effort.

When the source of meta-alloy dried up, every company that used them would go bankrupt within a month or so if they couldn't create a new supply. So they had to move as many facilities as possible to Witch Head to create that supply infrastructure. It would be mobile because that's how they work anyway -- to build new occulus stations they need to be where the station is going to be.

It would be a horrendous project management task but, if the need was there, it could be done.

We're not not talking people in EVA suits with spanners. There would have been massive foundries and production line factories in orbit creating prefabricated parts that robot freighters and tugs moved into place. So imagine that when you jumped into that system with your load of superconductors, you saw thousands of gigantic factory barges from hundreds of construction companies with hordes of robot ships weaving between them. You were directed to one of many delivery points in the system.

They couldn't represent that in game, no more than they could ask us to carry the thousands of different construction materials that they would have needed. It had to be largely symbolic.