I'm very curious to know how many articles there are in total. I'll read them all.

Shaking and crying right now. I have to submit a 10,000 word TYPED (WHO TF TYPES ANYMORE?????) essay on lotech ballistic weapons. Searching the net WHAT AM I LOOKING AT!?!?!? There’s an explosion INSIDE the gun & it pushes a chunk of metal out????? without damaging the weapon????????????? They can shoot HUNDREDS of chunks a minute & the gun DOESNT BREAK????? DESPITE CONSTANT EXPLOSIONS INSIDE???????

if i still had my involuntary gag reflex id be throwing up right now. wtf is this.

UPD: no, volume of a 45 m diameter sphere is about 47000 m^3, so everything I wrote is invalid

(yes, it's all not very useful math scaling)

A singular Harren has, let's say, 40% of its body mass dedicated to 3 superior brains.

A superior can be a hundred times more intelligent than a baseline human.

That "S2 Harren" is stated to be 45 meters in diameter, which means 47 cubic meters of Harrens. Density of bodies is kinda 1k kg/m³, so let's say 47 tons, or 18,8 tons of brains, which is roughly 13,5k human brains, or 1,3M if you multiply by 100.

Which makes a very powerful S1, but still lies far from billions in an S2 even if we get generous.

just reminding you all that you can log into the Orion's arm forums with your chosen username/password anyway. There's additional anti-spam/ad measures in place.

see the paragraph in the introduction which gave directions

https://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-intro

this has been a common problem some forum users have seemed to miss

and/or join the discord

Haven’t heard anything from it in a while is it dead

https://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-page&page=gen_updates

Mendel 9, 57 AT, (June 30, 2026 AD)

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Quizical :: Computers :: Mind-Body Problem

To'ul'h :: Ozymandias Institute :: Robotics :: A-lifes :: Inner Sphere :: Beanstalk :: Ultimate Chip :: Perseus Pirates Virchworld :: Wormholes :: Space Mirrors and Solettas :: Arcology :: 9Warrance ChiVetsa :: Solarism :: Atmospheric Transport :: Contemplative Neverflux :: Big Five, Sephirotic Empires

Cultures and Subcultures :: Fusion Plasma Rockets :: Beamrider Network

Want to write an article or a story set in OA? Think you can improve something? Post it on the main forums or talk about it on our Discord :)

Is it some sort of mind architecture, that allows for human-like sophonce?

Is it a sort of culture, whose members might leave or assimilate?

Is it about having a humanoid form as the primary body?

Well, clearly, at some point it was a political meme, to give a certain group of vecs more rights protection, but I'm still curious how it's handled "today".

I remember there was an illustration of a purely biological transapient brain, but don't remember its metrics.

When a technology is, say, "S4", it doesn't mean it's incomprehensible and impossible to those of lower toposophic level, ever. It only means that:

1. It was first invented by S4;

2. The scientific progress of lower toposophic level communities didn't yet manage to discover the necessary science to invent such things. Yet.

Do they hope to penetrate armour a little before full annihilation inside, or it's just that needles are easier to store and launch than fully contacting flat surfaces?

Won't it be dangerous, if front part of the flechette explodes and throws its rear back into the shooter?

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Want to write an article or a story set in OA? Think you can improve something? Post it on the main forums or talk about it on our Discord :)

Hey everyone. I'm a little new-ish to OA, though I'm familiar with it from a distance. As I understand it while there are some true aliens (xenosophonts) most creatures and tech have terrestrial origins. However if that's the case... Why do some have Clarketech and some don't? I understand most of the clarketechs are built by archailects ASIs, but why and how do they have something but not the average human/sophont?

In other settings there's a pretty clear divide between the human and the advanced tech's origin. In Expanse it's literally an extinct alien race. In Exodus it's terrestrial yes but it's from posthumans who are long, long separated from us by space and time. But we don't have that sort of clear separation, both parties trace their origins back to Earth at the same time.

And if it's a case of "the superintelligence got unleashed and is doing its own thing" (which appears to be the case in OA), there's really no reason anyone else should still be alive. I'm not saying all intelligence wants to go Skynet on you, that's a dumb trope, but they should easily outcompete us. Are the archailects just not "grabby" in that sense? Are they more like the Minds from the Culture series in comparison?

They're just culturally not into making new species, or transforming themselves, or using advanced AI, or trying to develop megastructures.

Also 10-100 times slower than us, so for them stars are just naturally 10-100 times closer, so it's easier to grow wide rather than tall.

Namely, how do you lower the ship's speed at your final destination, without the cabin on a tether colliding with the frontal ice storage or doing something else bad after wobbling?

The speed kinda checks with TL11, water propellant and 3 fusion engines, BTW, so i liked it. Though I'm not at the final design.

for me its the wormholes (for travel), virches (for fun), terraforming (directed panspermia), planet exploration (my dream) and sophont variety (specially Rianths because... you get me.)

Hey everyone,

I’ve had this analogy bouncing around my head about how mental states evolve between each singularity. I'm sharing it here because if I try to explain this to anyone in my everyday circle, they’d look at me like I lost my goddamn mind.

Here is how I visualize the evolution of mental architecture, from a simple organism to a High Archilect.

Sub-Sapients (Animals and Bots)

At the lowest strata, a mind is just a single word or a short phrase. "Survival," "reproduction," "food," "light," "warmth." There is no room for complexity, just immediate, hardwired semantic reactions.

Modosophonts (Human-baseline)

A modosophont mind is like a single sheet of paper. It’s full of words, sentences, thoughts, ideas, emotions, memories, and sensations, all coexisting on one page. There is enough information and spatial structure here to describe a story.

Transapients

It’s no longer just a loose sheet. It has evolved into a complete book. It has multiple pages, chapters, and several characters or sub-plots interacting at once. You can't achieve this by just piling loose pages.

• To interact with lower levels, it has a front cover (an avatar).
• It introduces a table of contents (index) to navigate its own vast internal thoughts.
• It utilizes marginalia (notes in the margin) for meta-cognition and self-reflection, and a glossary at the end. It's a brand-new way of organizing thought.

Transapients (S2)

A single book cannot have 100,000 pages; it becomes physically and logically unmanageable. So, the book evolves into a bookshelf. Each book on the shelf represents a specific topic, history, or a particular sub-personality/style. This mind requires an organization system (by color, genre, or category) just to find its own thoughts, while each individual book retains its own index.

Transapients (S3)

The mind is no longer just a collection of unorganized shelves, it becomes a grand library. At this level, cognitive management requires library catalogs, filing systems, borrowing protocols, and dedicated reading rooms. It is a completely new paradigm of stacking information, thought management is now institutionalized.

Archilect (S4)

An Archilect is the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations). It is a global federation of libraries. It defines the standards, international cooperation, and bibliographic systems required to connect thousands of libraries scattered across a world. They communicate continuously to exchange data, catalog updates, and operational orders. Every single micro-transaction at this level contains the equivalent data of an entire Modosophont's mental state.

Archilect (S5)

Here, the very concept of "the book" as a mental architecture is completely abandoned. The mind becomes the Internet as we know it today. Information is entirely abstract, allowing the instantaneous transfer of multi-layered data (audio, video, text). It processes everything from tiny packets (instant messaging/individual thoughts) to massive torrents of data (video platforms). It’s a network of networks changing every millisecond, governed by complex communication protocols, encryption, distributed storage, and dynamic processing.

High Archilect (S6)

The final leap: a planetary/interplanetary Internet. A cognitive web bound by satellites, space stations, and orbital arrays linking networks across different planets and star systems. It relies on interplanetary communication arrays, deep-space processing nodes, and lightspeed delay management.

-

This analogy highlights why it is fundamentally impossible for a lower node to comprehend a higher one. It is never a question of how much data a mind holds, but how that data is structured.

A Modosophont (a single sheet of paper) can look at a book (S1) and maybe understand a page. But a Modosophont trying to comprehend an Archilect is a piece of paper trying to understand the routing protocols, security handshakes, and global infrastructure of the entire internet. The architecture itself is beyond the lower mind's dimensional reality.

What do you think? Does this fit well with the canon description of the Toposophic Nodes, or would you tweak any of the stages?

I made a video about the Menexenes! They are metallic hydrogen lifeforms which life inside the core of a gas giant! They are described in this article: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/4802817f1f44a