THE WAR ON TERRA FORCES -
TALUS
"The machine has no feelings, it feels no fear and no hope...it operates according to the pure logic of probability. For this reason I assert that the robot perceives more accurately than man."
Max Frisch
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The Talus are named after the company that originally designed and created them - Talus Ltd. They were built to be fully programable autonomous mining and construction robots, intended to be sent out to build & repair current settlements as well as prepare & protect new celestial bodies for future Human colonisation. The beauty of the Talus was that they could be sent out at FTL speeds with no detrimental effects, and then self replicate indefinitely once new resources had been found and refined.
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Unfortunately not enough attention was paid to protecting the Talus from SEUs (Sudden Event Upsets) caused by solar flares and the resulting radiation. This led to affected units not only protecting their newly settled planets but actively seeking out life to destroy in order to prevent future threats to their existence. These mutated protocols spread quickly through the Talus as they self replicated exponentially and it wasn't long before these new mutations became part of all standard operating systems. This also prevented Humans from trying to patch and repair the software as any infiltration into a Talus colonies mainframe was viewed as aggressive intent and was defended violently.
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The Humans fear of rogue Artificial Intelligence led to an outright ban on its development & creation, which paved the way for companies like Talus to push their automatons for use in all aspects of everyday life. Ironically it's the cold unfeeling & unchangeable 'minds' of the Talus that have led to this inbuilt corrupted programming, where it could be argued that if they were artificially intelligent then we could have at least attempted to reason with them logically.
ATTACHMENTS & WEAPONRY
Constructed as autonomous mining robots there is not a huge array of different Talus attachments available, however each one differs vastly from every other in terms of their intended use and capabilities. The Talus offer a variety of attachment choices from huge close combat drilling rigs and rolling explosive drones to ultra precise long range laser cutters and computer guided missile arrays.
The Talus are unique in the way that none of their equipment was designed to be used specifically as a weapon. Created to mine, the Talus use their various supplementary components to do just that, and each one is crafted to perform a different mining operation. That being said the Talus were also originally programmed to protect their mining sites from external threats: and equipment constructed to take on some of the hardest minerals in existence are also very effective at carrying out that task.
View more Talus pictures HERE.
TALUS FACTIONS
After the demand for automated mining equipment continued to grow exponentially, Talus Ltd. decided to sell licences for their most sort after products. They came to the conclusion that it would be considerably easier and more cost effective to operate with this business model, as opposed to risking a huge investment in its own growth and infrastructure during what was still a very fragile economic period.
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This resulted in dozens of up and coming companies vying for the chance to cash in on this technology without having to work through the long and arduous process of creating and perfecting it themselves.
Pitches from eleven different companies impressed the board members at Talus Ltd. with bids that matched the shareholders expectations. These successful companies signed contracts, transferred funds and were given commercial licences for the most up to date cutting edge Talus technologies.
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With the Talus never being designed or intended to operate as an army, it lacks the traditional structure of having military factions and sub-factions. However, various aesthetic tweaks and programming changes led to very different designs and operational outputs [akin to being from different factions], depending on the company that had implemented them.
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Find out more about the Talus 'factions' HERE.
