Byzantine did not have many iterations, the mind mainly dealt with the bigger picture, they designed and planned but unlike the other minds they did not directly control many drones, Labyrinthine had fleets of construction drones, Bulwark had armies of combat drones and turrets, and Balistraia had her battalions and airforce, and while Byzantine had control over the logistics and courier drones they did not need direct control, at most they needed routes plotted.
This allowed Byzantine a perspective the other minds lacked, a Bulwark or Labyrinthine iteration only focused on one little slice of the factory, and while Balistraia was also a mind with few iterations she focused more on the moment and had little concern for things outside her duties and army, well besides her odd eccentrics. She just followed orders the best she could, if it wasn't for their constant discussion Byzantine would find it hard to imagine the combative mind even knew what the factory was doing half the time.
Byzantine was a mind made to plan and implement, and so while the other minds focused on the day to day they focused instead on the future, laying the groundwork for the factories continued survival.
Currently that groundwork was set up to different transportation and processing hubs, one for the north and one for the south, from these resources would be imported and sorted while supplies and materials would be stockpiled and sent out as required. Instead of factories these would instead be transportation 'warehouses' though they were considerably larger than that name would imply.
Byzantine was working with roughly 12 different Labyrinthine iterations and 2 Bulwark iterations to get the transportation hubs sorted, before any building could begin the land needed cleared and subterranean defenses needed installed, the muddy and wet ground was making the work difficult though, Still Byzantine had been informed by the central Labyrinthine that the soil could be a problem and had accounted for that in their timetables.
Byzantines' attention left the building once they had ensured everything was still going according to plan, the other minds would inform them if anything changed on the construction front, so Byzantine was free to pursue other matters. Setting up a transportation network was more than just building a few warehouses after all, train lines needed built, robo ports needed installed at key points and courier drone routes needed plotted.
The current train network was a massive interconnected web, every single outpost could send a train to any other outpost, even if it would take a fair bit for the trains to arrive. Consolidating all of that into just 2 central points? That was not such a simple task. Before the order came to build 2 central points Byzantine had dealt with the long travel time issue VIA having storehouses at key outposts so that resources and supplies could easily be shipped in and out, those storehouses were then expanded to process raw material rather than processing on site, which allowed larger and more expensive machines to process the resources of several different mining outposts, leading to less ore being lost in the refinement process, and freeing up more trains from needing to visit each individual outpost to pick up relatively small amounts of ore.
The storehouses were however not designed with this purpose in mind, and while they had been modified for the purpose it was deemed a more efficient method should be designed, thus 2 larger complexes to serving to both refine raw ore into something with as little rock and as much metal as possible, and to work as central storehouses, supplying every outpost in their section.
This meant that travel times became an issue again, but Byzantine was a planning mind, and when they encountered a problem they came up with more than one solution, just in case they encountered a similar problem later.
The wide spread storehouse solution had just been the easiest to implement quickly, and when faced with other more pressing problems the quick and easy solution was chosen. Now that the mind had a little more time on its 'hands' they could afford to implement better but more time intensive solutions.
The solution was redesigning the rail network, going through dense forest and tall hills rather than around, taking straighter routes to the outposts to lessen travel time, along with keeping the paths with as few turns and stops as possible to increase how long the trains could move at full speed. And it didn't hurt that the current trains moved significantly faster than their older counterparts, with the higher quality fuel and engines.
That still left the logistics and courier drones though, and considering their drastically slower speed having them ship resources out by themselves was considerably less efficient.
But Byzantine had known about these deficiencies before the robots even entered production, it was basic logic that small robots couldn't move as far or quick as trains.
The solution then needed to both increase their speed and range, and considering upgrading them enough to solve the problem would be nearly impossible with the current resources the simple solution was impossible.
So it was time to get a little clever, if the robots didn't have the energy or fuel to make the full distance don't make the robots run the full distance, and if the robots aren't fast enough to transport the resources use something faster.
Taking a little inspiration from the original store room method Byzantine ran a few simulations with each outpost having a contingent of courier drones, and instead of each drone running the full distance for every trip they would instead meet another drone halfway, from the outpost that sent the request.
And for longer trips the courier drones could ride the trains for higher speeds, their claws would be ideal for gripping onto and climbing surfaces, so there would be little worry of a courier drone falling off a train.
Byzantine thought about how to run the logistics bots, but honestly they didn't need any changes. Any use was restricted to inside the factories or to the nearest train station to unload. They didn't do long range delivery.
It was the work of a few moments to task a few Labyrinthines to start constructing the ports the courier drones would need, along with a few modification to the train cars to allow more courier drones to ride along.
That whole process had taken the mind less than an hour, including plotting the exact routes the couriers would take and changing the train schedules and parameters to allow more couriers to board as needed.
And that was just what the bulk of the mind's attention was focused on, there was still the nearly constant resource requests to be approved or denied, the mind still needed to monitor and adjust how much of everything was made or produced, and the Byzantine was in constant conversation with the other main minds.
Saying there was only one Byzantine was probably inaccurate, it was more like 3 closely linked byzantines with only vague borders between them.
One Byzantine to make plans and run simulations to ensure they worked.
One to manage the factory and its resources.
One Byzantine to Liaise with the other minds, both the original iterations and their 'lesser' iterations.
But these three tasks coincide enough that the three Byzantines saw little need to make themselves meaningfully distinct from one another, so there was just 'one' Byzantine, functioning much like how a human's left and right brain halves work together in concert.
It was the piece of Byzantine in charge of working and communicating with the other minds that was currently the most busy, as was usually the case considering it handled all the resource and allocation requests, but the current task of making a massive perimeter was pushing the piece near its limits, but considering its limits could be expanded with a simple request to the maker and Labyrinthine that was less of a concern than it could be.
The most significant drain on the minds attention was working with several bulwarks and labyrinthines on implementing the large perimeter around the factories nominal 'territory', ensuring that each mind on the project knew what resources it had to use and determining where the priorities were was a task for the other halves, but this fragment still needed to relay this information and ensure it was being correctly implemented, along with sending its other halves information and modifications the other minds made to the plans.
Its job was to listen and debate with the other minds over what could or should be done on the behalf of its other selves, and while none of the minds ever got upset or refused to come to an agreement debating with dozens of other intelligences of relatively equal cognitive power was a task that needed quite a bit of dedicated attention.
Talking with a bulwark and labyrinthine over the practicality of changing the standard wall composition and the resources it would require, discussing the strategies Balistraia would be employing and what resources she would use, debating with a labyrinthine over the ideal formation to use belt in (it varied on the specific situation), telling a bulwark that its outpost would be receiving either more or less resources based on availability and time, and informing the main minds of every major event and occurrence and discussing the actions that could be taken to solve them.
None of the other minds interacted with each other on near the scale Byzantine constantly did, their interactions were limited to discussions with one or two of their counterparts, in fact if not for the makers omnipresent awareness while sleeping Byzantine would be the individual with the most contact with all the minds.
It was because of this that Byzantine had a greater insight into how the other minds thought and functioned, the only things that ever truly surprised the mind were actions taken by the maker. They always made sense in hindsight, but there was little constancy to the decision making. One day the maker would be obsessively concerned with his own safety and the next he would start experimenting with volatile chemicals in an enclosed space.
Sometimes the maker would forgo sleep for days at a time, building complex machinery in a near trance, designing new weapon systems or methods of construction, or machines that seemingly had no true purpose, a large machine that uses friction to boil water one day and the next a turret that fires superheated pelts of acid. There was no constancy or logic to the behavior, and without the advanced subroutines the combat minds possessed to predict organics Byzantine was often left confused by the actions the maker undertook.
Byzantine was at its core a mind that thrived on numbers and statistics, logic and facts. So the maker was something Byzantine fundamentally could not understand, but the mind was well aware that it did not need to. The maker would continue to function, if erratically, as long as Byzantine could manage.
And the task Byzantine had been made to do, the task that needed to be done to ensure the maker survived as long as possible? It was to ensure that the factory operated as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
AN-
Labyrinthine - to make the factory grow
Byzantine - to optimise the factory so that it may grow quicker
Bulwark - to protect the factory so that it may safely grow
Balistraria - to pave the way for the factories growth
eh there's a bunch more that Byzantine does but that should be a slight glimpse into what the mind does on a day to day, Byzantine is arguably the brain of the factory
how do you solve a framerate issue? by improving the hardware of course!
this is technically speaking before the Nauvis thing so that's why it wasn't brought up.
I don't know when the maker became the name for the engineer, he had like 3 titles, 'the creator', 'the maker', and used exclusively by Balistraria 'the commander'
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