Panopticon (CivBE)

Wonders

Panopticon
Wonder in Beyond Earth
Cost	250
Maintenance	None
Requires	Defense Grid
Specialist slots	None
Effect	+5 Orbital Strike Range
Notes	All Military Units receive +1 Sight.

Quote

"There's an old soldier's axiom: 'You can't kill what you can't see.' The inverse is also true." - Rejinaldo Leonardo Pedro Bolivar de Alencar-Araripe, Principles of Modern War

History

The sophistication of the Panopticon is a product of centuries of combat analytics that predate Planetfall, and likely the Great Mistake itself (why else would "Mutually Assured Destruction" be found within its solution space?). What the Panopticon represents is the adaptation of these analytics to an accurate, if basic, understanding of the planet itself. It represents the point at which another tool of the colonists went from Earth-centered assumptions to ones appropriate for the new world.

For the interested student of history, the Panopticon's algorithms are an insight into paranoia and violence. Everything detectable is screened for threat, and then parsed within categories (and such truly fascinating categories!) and matched with a response ranging from "evaluate again in n seconds" to the euphemistic "terminate with extreme prejudice".

The hardware of the Panopticon has long since been lost to time, but archaeological remains of it show up in surprising places from time to time. Most recently, the Altar of St. Mendez of the Sect of Post-Dehn was found to be made from the casing of an inert Panopticon hardpoint.

Images