Minium Forces?

[Mr Bean]

Since I don't know as much about the Culture as I should this post is twofold

One What do you think is the minium Force Requirment to take on the
SW
ST
B5
40k
and hmmm
LOTR Unverise
Complete and Total Domination and to not mess things up, no co-outs are allowed for the Defenders
This means
No Sun-Crushers
No Time Travel
No Nano-bots Death Clouds
Charater Shield Generators are out of service till the janitor can turn em on next week

Minium Forces to beat each Universe? Totaly and Completly, All mentioed Major Races, Not for Example, Apollo in ST or the Vong in SW, Same thing with the Valher in LOTR

[Mr Bean]

Second part is anyone have a complete list of Culture books?

[Darth_Shinji]

Do you mean what other force could take these on without going into uber-ville? Or how much force the culture would use to take them down without destroying everything?

[Pablo Sanchez]

Since I don't know as much about the Culture as I should this post is twofold

One What do you think is the minium Force Requirment to take on the
SW
ST
B5

One bog standard ship.

40k

Probably 10 or so major ships.

and hmmm
LOTR Unverise

One drone the size of a cigarette pack.

I know a few Culture books--
Consider Phlebas
Use of Weapons
Excession

There are more, but I don't know them.

[RayCav of ASVS]

One drone the size of a cigarette pack.

Are you sure you don't mean that for ST as well?

[Mr Bean]

How would the Drone get around?

[NecronLord]

WH40K?

You mean the IoM right?
Probably a few large GSVs

Or everything?
They couldn't the warfleet of the Culture consists of (from excession)
64x11 Rapis assault vessels.
The Necrons could match that fairly easily, and then there are the eldar and the tryanids (Bio-ships, yuck)
So The culture could probably commit it's entire warfleet and loose.

It should also be noted that there is not space in middle earth.

[Luke Hares]

WH40K?

You mean the IoM right?
Probably a few large GSVs

Or everything?
They couldn't the warfleet of the Culture consists of (from excession)
64x11 Rapis assault vessels.
The Necrons could match that fairly easily, and then there are the eldar and the tryanids (Bio-ships, yuck)
So The culture could probably commit it's entire warfleet and loose.

It should also be noted that there is not space in middle earth.

Wibbly Wibbly Wibbly - 64*11 Rapis assult vessels... Given your writing skills, I'm not surprised you clearly have difficulty reading...

Right, Culture Info...

Novels (in order)

Consider Phelbas (set 800 yrs before the rest of them)
Player of Games
Use of Weapons
Excession
Look to Windward

Inversions (kinda)
State of the Art (two stories)

Culture fleet is numbered in 100's of millions of craft - the Culture is actually a space faring civilisation - it only actually ocupies a few hundred planets, which are regarded as mass inefficent and rather unsafe.

Culture ROUs (Rapid Offensive Units) are capable off engaging multiple enemy vessels in microseconds (entire battles last just seconds) and are characters in their own right, the bodies of Minds of staggering power (A Culture AI running an orbital will usually be maintaining about 300 million avatars at once).

A Culture GSV (the equivalent of cities) will have an outer field layer probably about 200 miles long, by 50 miles, by 50. The war preped version won't include the 250 million people, the gas giant park, the artifically sun and all the other stuff they normally carry about.

The drone described above doesn't need any more transport - its certain got an FTL drive of its own - though probably not terribly fast

No other universe comes close to Culture Minds. Any universe where the principle protaganists have to talk to each other at speed that you or I can understand loses, simple as that.

As the old tag line goes,

Don't fuck with the Culture

[Howedar]

Entire battles take far less than seconds.

[Luke Hares]

Depends what you think of as a battle - Ship to ship engagments - microseconds for sure - battles, with reinforcements, planetry systems swapping hands, orbitals destroyed, that sort of thing. That takes a bit longer

But it still happens on an entirely inhuman timescale.

[XaLEv]

In chronological order, as best as I can remember:

Consider Phlebas - 1300s
Use of Weapons - 1800s
Excession - 1800s
State of the Art - 1977
Player of Games - 2000s
Look to Windward - 2100s

Not sure about Inversions and the second Culture story in the State of the Art anthology.

[Luke Hares]

In chronological order, as best as I can remember:

Consider Phlebas - 1300s
Use of Weapons - 1800s
Excession - 1800s
State of the Art - 1977
Player of Games - 2000s
Look to Windward - 2100s

Not sure about Inversions and the second Culture story in the State of the Art anthology.

Not disputing, but how do you date the later ones? Surely Use of Weapons must happen after the State of the Art as in State of the Art Sma is just a (young) member of Contact whilst in Use of Weapons she's a fully fledged Special Circumstances agent.

Excession is also the only book that describes gelfield technology - describing it as a fairly recent invention, which isn't mentioned in any of the others, so I imagined that it was the most modern.

[NecronLord]

WH40K?

You mean the IoM right?
Probably a few large GSVs

Or everything?
They couldn't the warfleet of the Culture consists of (from excession)
64x11 Rapis assault vessels.
The Necrons could match that fairly easily, and then there are the eldar and the tryanids (Bio-ships, yuck)
So The culture could probably commit it's entire warfleet and loose.

It should also be noted that there is not space in middle earth.

Wibbly Wibbly Wibbly - 64*11 Rapis assult vessels... Given your writing skills, I'm not surprised you clearly have difficulty reading...

Right, Culture Info...

Novels (in order)

Consider Phelbas (set 800 yrs before the rest of them)
Player of Games
Use of Weapons
Excession
Look to Windward

Inversions (kinda)
State of the Art (two stories)

Culture fleet is numbered in 100's of millions of craft - the Culture is actually a space faring civilisation - it only actually ocupies a few hundred planets, which are regarded as mass inefficent and rather unsafe.

Culture ROUs (Rapid Offensive Units) are capable off engaging multiple enemy vessels in microseconds (entire battles last just seconds) and are characters in their own right, the bodies of Minds of staggering power (A Culture AI running an orbital will usually be maintaining about 300 million avatars at once).

A Culture GSV (the equivalent of cities) will have an outer field layer probably about 200 miles long, by 50 miles, by 50. The war preped version won't include the 250 million people, the gas giant park, the artifically sun and all the other stuff they normally carry about.

The drone described above doesn't need any more transport - its certain got an FTL drive of its own - though probably not terribly fast

No other universe comes close to Culture Minds. Any universe where the principle protaganists have to talk to each other at speed that you or I can understand loses, simple as that.

As the old tag line goes,

Don't fuck with the Culture

GSV's are 200 miles long?
I don't think so.

Sleeper Service, A plate class, the largest I have heard of is; (Excession 7-I-II) Four Kilmeters thick, and about 90km long.

It takes culture ships weeks to cross the milky way galaxy. It takes the necrons less than a second. The Culture has only reached a few other galaxies (correct me if I am wrong). The necrons have created them and destroyed them for entertainment. And the Necrontyr do not talk at human speeds, it is unclear what rate they communicate at. The Iom Would be screwed, but the Necrons would actually be able to fight the culture, and win.

[GSV Use Psychology]

GSV's are 200 miles long?
I don't think so.

Sleeper Service, A plate class, the largest I have heard of is; (Excession 7-I-II) Four Kilmeters thick, and about 90km long.

It takes culture ships weeks to cross the milky way galaxy. It takes the necrons less than a second. The Culture has only reached a few other galaxies (correct me if I am wrong). The necrons have created them and destroyed them for entertainment. And the Necrontyr do not talk at human speeds, it is unclear what rate they communicate at. The Iom Would be screwed, but the Necrons would actually be able to fight the culture, and win.

The fields are practically considered hull in the Culture, since they can support entire ecosystems inside them. The main structure might be 90km, but with fields it's closer to 200km. The largest GSV to my knowledge is the System class.

"She hadn't encountered a System class before, and secretly hoped the scale of the vessel, with its many separate components riding suspended inside a bubble of air two hundred kilometres long, and its complement of six billion souls, would provide her with some new inspiration."
Consider Phlebas, page 471

I don't know anything of the Necrons so I can't really comment on how they would fare. The general advantages or the Culture and their contemporaries in vs debates have been:

1. Combat speed. Unless your ships have reaction speeds measured in micro/nanoseconds they can't react fast enough to hurt Culture ships.

2. Weapons range. Culture ships can engage from distances of multiple light-years.

"He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself to not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometres away. That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off . . . and still have no good idea why you were fighting."
Consider Phlebas, page 33


3. Mobililty. Most of the Cultures industry is based on the GSV's. Thus it's very difficult to hurt their ability to wage war, since the GSV's can keep, moving and still produce warships. Once fully converted to wartime production the GSV's can churn out ships quite rapidly.

None of the conventional races in ST, B5 or SW stands a chance against a single Culture warship (probably not even against a standard ship). LOTR is cannonfodder against combat drones. Nothing in 40k, that depends on human reaction times, stands a chance either.

[IDMR]

Pre-emptive warning. Both Vultures and 40K fanatics please refrain from... oh... over-zealous debating tactics.

[Cpt_Frank]

Since I don't know as much about the Culture as I should this post is twofold

One What do you think is the minium Force Requirment to take on the
SW
ST
B5

One bog standard ship.

40k

Probably 10 or so major ships.

and hmmm
LOTR Unverise

One drone the size of a cigarette pack.

I know a few Culture books--
Consider Phlebas
Use of Weapons
Excession

There are more, but I don't know them.

Is SW so much weaker than WH40K?

[consequences]

because 40k doesn't have any requirement to be internally consistent, yes, it has been portrayed as more powerful than Star Wars.

[NecronLord]

I will grant that a few GSV would be enough to destroy almost all of the 40k universe, with the exception of the necrons, who could leave the culture standing and skip off to another galactic cluster.

I accept the 200Km then. as that is to all intents and purposes the ship. In many areas the culture outstrip the necrons (shameful though it is for me to admit it.) Just out of curiosity does anyone know how large the largest orbital is? How do effectors work?

And yes 40k isn't internally self consistent. But I would say that the scource material takes precedent over game mechanics. For example we know that any advanced weapon has decent range, and the background material supports this, but game mechanics has heavily shortened ranges, otherwise you would have hire a feild to play using artillery .

The culture could possibly, depending on how much rescurces they have avalable. drive the necrons from the galaxy, but they would not be destroyed.

[GSV Use Psychology]

Effectors aren't really explained, thankfully I might add. They appear to be able to manipulate almost any conceivable type of technological and biological system that is more complicated than a simple mechanical system. (Eg an Effector is useless against a shotgun.) In the novels various types of effectors have been used to take control of aircraft, short-circuit weapons, open locks, hack into security systems, communication over interstellar distances, reading/manipulating/controlling minds (both machine and biological) and producing artificial auroras.

"But he did discover that a drone like Mahwrin-Skel, even in civilianised form, was capable of sustaining a one way real-time link with such a ship over millennia distances, so long as the ship was watching out for the signal and knew where to look.
[…]
From what he could tell from the information he'd discovered, Mawhrin-Skel's claim that the Mind had recorded their conversation would not hold up if the ship was more than about twenty millennia away…"
Player of Games, page 66


"'How far away is it from here?' 'Hey; calm down. It's about two and a half millennia away.'
[…]
Two thousand five hundred light years. It was, as the urbanely well-travelled people on a GSV would say, a long walk. But close enough -by quite a long way- for a warship to minutely target an effector, throw a sensing field a light-second in diameter across the sky, and pick up the weak but indisputable flicker of coherent HS light coming from a machine small enough to fit into a pocket."
Player of Games, page 69

"The ship saluted too, using its effectors to produce artificial auroras; roaring, shifting folds of light in the clear still air above it." Player of Games, page 301


When used to communicate Effectors have a time-lag over larger distances. This makes realtime conversation impossible, as seen in Player of Games. I suspect that effectors work at the speed light has in hyperspace, but that's just my guess.

There are different types of effectors, ranging form those used by civilian drones, to military suites and combat drones all the way to military grade effectors used in warships (i presume).


Orbitals are about 10 to 14 million kilometres long. Making them a couple of million kilometres in diameter.

For some good general info on the Culture go to http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~stefan/culture.html. The essay is written by the author himself, and while it doesn't dwelve into much technological or military detail, it's a good read.

Lastly a few statistics from the Culture-Idiran war, the last major war the Culture's fought.

"Statistics Length of war: forty-eight years, one month. Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (+- .3%). Losses ships (all classes above interplanetary) - 91,215,660 (+- 200); Orbitals - 14,334; planets and major moons - 53; Rings - 1; Spheres - 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration) - 6. Historical perspective A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population. Rumours persist of far more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of time and space. . . . Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy's elder civilisations rate the Idiran-Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of those singularly interesting Events they see so rarely these days."
Consider Phlebas, page 462

[XaLEv]

Not disputing, but how do you date the later ones? Surely Use of Weapons must happen after the State of the Art as in State of the Art Sma is just a (young) member of Contact whilst in Use of Weapons she's a fully fledged Special Circumstances agent.

Excession is also the only book that describes gelfield technology - describing it as a fairly recent invention, which isn't mentioned in any of the others, so I imagined that it was the most modern.

7000 BC - Birth of the Culture
500 AD - Zetetic Elench split from Culture
800 AD Discovery of Pittance
14th Century AD - Consider Phlebas
19th - 21st Century AD - Use Of Weapons
1977 AD - "The State Of The Art"
22nd Century AD - Look To Windward

from http://web.onetel.net.uk/~zakalwe/imb/culture.htm

IIRC, it was stated in Excession that the Idiran war happened 500 years prior, and in Player of Games that the war was 700 years prior. I haven't read any of the others yet.

[NecronLord]

Many thanks for that.

[Luke Hares]

Not disputing, but how do you date the later ones? Surely Use of Weapons must happen after the State of the Art as in State of the Art Sma is just a (young) member of Contact whilst in Use of Weapons she's a fully fledged Special Circumstances agent.

Excession is also the only book that describes gelfield technology - describing it as a fairly recent invention, which isn't mentioned in any of the others, so I imagined that it was the most modern.

7000 BC - Birth of the Culture
500 AD - Zetetic Elench split from Culture
800 AD Discovery of Pittance
14th Century AD - Consider Phlebas
19th - 21st Century AD - Use Of Weapons
1977 AD - "The State Of The Art"
22nd Century AD - Look To Windward

from http://web.onetel.net.uk/~zakalwe/imb/culture.htm

IIRC, it was stated in Excession that the Idiran war happened 500 years prior, and in Player of Games that the war was 700 years prior. I haven't read any of the others yet.

You may well be right about Excession - memory not what it should be. I've lost my copy of State of the Art, but I'm sure it features a younger Sma than appears in Use of Weapons (The best one, by the way - read it!) So his time line must be confused.

[Luke Hares]

Good beginnings of a FAQ though