Something I wrote both for Fenspace and for CitD... I would like to make it a central part of CIs mission to the FRR.
What do you think?
Compact Integrated Factory Seed
(also known as "Catgirl Industries Factory System" or "Cats Toy Box")
History
The CIFS is a successor of the factory system that grew on the Catgirl Industries space station Jenga between 2015 and 2022. The original factory was grown and chaotic structure, where the catgirls explored hundreds of different paths in their quest for creating new things. Most of them had to be changed or completely dropped in this process.
In 2022 Jet Jaguar proposed that Catgirl Industries should try something new with their fabrication system. Within the next three year, The catgirls began to have a close look at the chaos on Jenga and began to replicate the proven and useful parts in one of the old mining areas at 77 Frigga. After three years of hard work the Frigga Factory Complex was finished.
Still, the catgirls were not completely happy with the results.
It had taken a huge amount of time and resources to build the new factory, which was a blow to the idea of the catgirls to replicate the factory in other places for friends in the belt. Based on their experience during the three years, they started the Compact Integrated Factory Seed project.
The Seed
The Seed is an oversized Fen shipping container filled completely with all kinds of machines and special supplies, including a small group of Exocomps. It also contains a sophisticated computer system to control a small factory system.
The Seed is not a factory itself, but it is the minimal set of equipment and tools to setup a small factory complex that can produce everything Catgirl Industries ever produced, from tiny optical chips to a ship as the Normandy. This also includes new Seeds.
To use the Seed you need a fitting area to deploy the hardware and access to metal and organic resources to build the larger machines for the full factory. Depending on the available manpower and resources it can take up to a year to finish a small factory, which then can be extended over time to build larger things.
The control system dilemma
When the catgirls at Jenga built up their factory technology, they designed everything for being controlled by an AI. Cortana is omnipresent in Catgirl Industries facilities, so the question how to do it without her and the Exocomps hivemind never was asked… at least until the CIFS project started.
After long experiments it turned out that the necessary technology can be used without a sentient AI controlling them, but the factory system is much less efficient without one. Which gives the owner of a new factory complex three options.
First, the factory can be run in 'basic' mode, which means that only the non-sentient expert system is used.
Second option is to setup your own AI system. It takes a construction interested A-class AI to run a factory complex at full efficiency. This is quite hard to do because CI's optical circuits are specially designed to to develop AIs on their own.
The final option is to call up Catgirl Industries and ask Cortana and Serina if they want to watch over your new factory. While this is a very efficient solution, it also requires enough trust and enthusiasm in open source production. On the other side being part of the Open Seed Community provides free updates regarding the factory and its software.
Educational software
The computer system of the Seed is equipped with state of the art learning software, allowing people to learn the background of the machines and products of the factory system. When equipped with a full AI, some factories provide school like education for children related to their products.
Catgirl Industries consider this software work-in-progress and is constantly improving it with the help of other education interested parties in Fenspace.
Trivia
Transhuman control system (Infinity/CitD)?
Many users of the Factory Seeds were not happy about their options to run the factory with or without an AI. Running a factory without an AI is a lot of hard work and asking Cortana and Serina is not a valid option for a many Fen.
Waving their own AI is often even worse, because you could easily get an AI that doesn't want to work with you or has some crazy ideas what products to make.
To resolve this issue Catgirl Industries added another options to the Seed package, the TCS or Transhuman Control System.
Before the TCS can be used, the person has to run a number of mental tests, making sure it is considered stable and mature enough to run something as complex as the factory system.
The TCS combines a biomod with a special cybernetic implant to network the brain of a human being together with the computer system of the factory to form the necessary entity to control the factory at full efficiency level.
The computer system provides a lot of support in form of knowledge providing expert systems and runs background tasks while the human brain is providing creativity and long term planning capacity.
In theory the implants could be removed again, but it would require a monthlong slow withdrawal of the computer enhancements and a lot of therapy. Some people might just become mad.
Trivia
What do you think?
Compact Integrated Factory Seed
(also known as "Catgirl Industries Factory System" or "Cats Toy Box")
History
The CIFS is a successor of the factory system that grew on the Catgirl Industries space station Jenga between 2015 and 2022. The original factory was grown and chaotic structure, where the catgirls explored hundreds of different paths in their quest for creating new things. Most of them had to be changed or completely dropped in this process.
In 2022 Jet Jaguar proposed that Catgirl Industries should try something new with their fabrication system. Within the next three year, The catgirls began to have a close look at the chaos on Jenga and began to replicate the proven and useful parts in one of the old mining areas at 77 Frigga. After three years of hard work the Frigga Factory Complex was finished.
Still, the catgirls were not completely happy with the results.
It had taken a huge amount of time and resources to build the new factory, which was a blow to the idea of the catgirls to replicate the factory in other places for friends in the belt. Based on their experience during the three years, they started the Compact Integrated Factory Seed project.
The Seed
The Seed is an oversized Fen shipping container filled completely with all kinds of machines and special supplies, including a small group of Exocomps. It also contains a sophisticated computer system to control a small factory system.
The Seed is not a factory itself, but it is the minimal set of equipment and tools to setup a small factory complex that can produce everything Catgirl Industries ever produced, from tiny optical chips to a ship as the Normandy. This also includes new Seeds.
To use the Seed you need a fitting area to deploy the hardware and access to metal and organic resources to build the larger machines for the full factory. Depending on the available manpower and resources it can take up to a year to finish a small factory, which then can be extended over time to build larger things.
The control system dilemma
When the catgirls at Jenga built up their factory technology, they designed everything for being controlled by an AI. Cortana is omnipresent in Catgirl Industries facilities, so the question how to do it without her and the Exocomps hivemind never was asked… at least until the CIFS project started.
After long experiments it turned out that the necessary technology can be used without a sentient AI controlling them, but the factory system is much less efficient without one. Which gives the owner of a new factory complex three options.
First, the factory can be run in 'basic' mode, which means that only the non-sentient expert system is used.
Second option is to setup your own AI system. It takes a construction interested A-class AI to run a factory complex at full efficiency. This is quite hard to do because CI's optical circuits are specially designed to to develop AIs on their own.
The final option is to call up Catgirl Industries and ask Cortana and Serina if they want to watch over your new factory. While this is a very efficient solution, it also requires enough trust and enthusiasm in open source production. On the other side being part of the Open Seed Community provides free updates regarding the factory and its software.
Educational software
The computer system of the Seed is equipped with state of the art learning software, allowing people to learn the background of the machines and products of the factory system. When equipped with a full AI, some factories provide school like education for children related to their products.
Catgirl Industries consider this software work-in-progress and is constantly improving it with the help of other education interested parties in Fenspace.
Trivia
- The factory needs access to asteroid resources (metals, organic elements, water) as a bare minimum. Hydrocarbons help to speed up optical circuit production.
- A factory seed normally comes with a Interwave transmitter connecting it point to point to its 'parent' factory for communication.
- Fen who asked Cortana and Serina to run their factory reports that they sometimes get visits from 'foreign' Exocomps when lots of work has to be done.
- While in theory a large factory could run without any humanoid participants and be considered full Von Neumann, it normally doesn't work out in the end.
Transhuman control system (Infinity/CitD)?
Many users of the Factory Seeds were not happy about their options to run the factory with or without an AI. Running a factory without an AI is a lot of hard work and asking Cortana and Serina is not a valid option for a many Fen.
Waving their own AI is often even worse, because you could easily get an AI that doesn't want to work with you or has some crazy ideas what products to make.
To resolve this issue Catgirl Industries added another options to the Seed package, the TCS or Transhuman Control System.
Before the TCS can be used, the person has to run a number of mental tests, making sure it is considered stable and mature enough to run something as complex as the factory system.
The TCS combines a biomod with a special cybernetic implant to network the brain of a human being together with the computer system of the factory to form the necessary entity to control the factory at full efficiency level.
The computer system provides a lot of support in form of knowledge providing expert systems and runs background tasks while the human brain is providing creativity and long term planning capacity.
In theory the implants could be removed again, but it would require a monthlong slow withdrawal of the computer enhancements and a lot of therapy. Some people might just become mad.
Trivia
- It takes an acclimation period of weeks to get used to the TCS for a new user.
- It takes even longer to reset the factory to a new user if the old one should become disconnected. The longer an user is connected to the factory, the longer it takes to reset it.