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SCP | Tale | GOI | Art Random Page How many SCPs exist? Forum » SCP Universe / Foundation Universe » How many SCPs exist? Started by: Zmax15 Date: 21 Mar 2016 01:33 Number of posts: 14 RSS: New posts Unfold All Fold All More Options Edit Title & Description Stickness Lock Thread Move Thread Fold How many SCPs exist? Zmax15 21 Mar 2016 01:33

According to your headcanon, do all of the SCPs (except those that you don't like or otherwise exclude) currently (or eventually) listed exist? Some of them might contradict one-another, but otherwise, how many SCPs does the Foundation actually have locked-up? Are all the SCPs yet-to-be written there too, like the Series IV and V numbers in some tales? How big is the Foundation per-SCP contained? What's the average cost?

Reply Options Unfold How many SCPs exist? by Zmax15, 21 Mar 2016 01:33 Fold Re: How many SCPs exist? MrWrong 21 Mar 2016 01:55

That really depends on your headcanon.

For me, I regard all the SCPs to be part of a multiversal archive. In an infinite number of universes, there can be an infinite number of anomalies. This way, SCPs can contradict one another and still make sense in the greater scheme of things — provided they are from different universes.

Also, if there is an infinite number of universes, resources from these universes will logically be infinite. That will cover the massive costs of the Foundation maintaining all their SCPs in the long term.

e.g. SCP-A to G are in Universe Alpha, while SCP-H to Z are in Universe Beta (for an oversimplification of this concept).

Interestingly, this is the basis in which I set How 173 Got to Site-19.

Reply Options Unfold Re: How many SCPs exist? by MrWrong, 21 Mar 2016 01:55 Fold Re: How many SCPs exist? sirpudding 21 Mar 2016 03:21

I treat every SCP as independent more-or-less unless it specifically belongs to a canon or series, or has a cross-reference or something similar.

Clearly some things are highly incompatible with other stuff. Examples that immediately come to mind:

• Pitch Haven has to be basically independent, because it has a cosmology with a literal God and Garden of Eden (near Las Vegas, Nevada, even), and also reincarnation of primal animal spirits and a bunch of stuff like that which is incompatible with anything that has a different cosmology, biological evolution, a billions of years old Earth or really any scientific rigor.
• SCP-2845 takes place in a "broken masquerade" setting.
• SCP-2442 has the entire setting as a metaphor for the mental state of a mundane girl undergoing psychiatric treatment in the real world.

Last edited on 21 Mar 2016 05:05 by sirpudding Show more Reply Options Unfold Re: How many SCPs exist? by sirpudding, 21 Mar 2016 03:21 Fold Re: How many SCPs exist? drquartz 21 Mar 2016 03:43

How was I supposed to understand 2442? There was nothing there that implied she was more than a reality bender.

Reply Options Unfold Re: How many SCPs exist? by drquartz, 21 Mar 2016 03:43 Fold Re: How many SCPs exist? sirpudding 21 Mar 2016 03:58

Wouldn't that question make more sense in the discussion page for that article?

Reply Options Unfold Re: How many SCPs exist? by sirpudding, 21 Mar 2016 03:58 Fold Re: How many SCPs exist? Bryx 21 Mar 2016 04:01

Like how anyone the psychiatrist talks to talks like the woman, or how the content of the interviews sounds like a psychiatrist talking the woman through her issues, or how the O5 has a slip and says "she" needs us when he's talking about the world.

Reply Options Unfold Re: How many SCPs exist? by Bryx, 21 Mar 2016 04:01 Fold Re: How many SCPs exist? MrWrong 21 Mar 2016 14:33

Pitch Haven has to be basically independent, because it has a cosmology with a literal God and Garden of Eden (near Las Vegas, Nevada, even), and also reincarnation of primal animal spirits and a bunch of stuff like that which is incompatible with anything that has a different cosmology, biological evolution, a billions of years old Earth or really any scientific rigor.

That would explain why Pitch Haven did not do much for me. I guess I will look at Pitch Haven with all those in mind, hereon.

Reply Options Unfold Re: How many SCPs exist? by MrWrong, 21 Mar 2016 14:33 Fold Re: How many SCPs exist? Drewbear 21 Mar 2016 13:54

My headcanon is that there's a multiverse situation going on. There is an extremely large, but finite, number of universes in which conditions are right for something like the Foundation to exist, but there's not really a "core" universe. Each universe has a varying number of SCPs in it, but none have all of the ones on the mainlist. Some do have contradictory SCPs, though, because their particular universe is just fucked like that.

I think that there are certain "core" SCPs that appear in most Foundation-style universes, though not necessarily all. 173, 682, and 914 are some of those. Some only appear in one universe, including my favorite, 093.

Additionally, a lot (though not necessarily most) Foundation-style universes are… degrading, for lack of a better term. The number of SCP-level Items is actively increasing, and eventually those universes will have their laws of physics so thoroughly and completely broken that they'll just kind of… unravel.

A useful metaphor: the sum of all Foundation-style universes form a large & thick "rope" where individual universes are separate threads. Individual threads are starting to fray and snap due to friction and the total rope is slowly getting weaker and weaker. Eventually, the whole thing is going to break, unless some way is discovered to reinforce the rope.

Giving bearhugs to the unsuspecting since 1872.

Reply Options Unfold Re: How many SCPs exist? by Drewbear, 21 Mar 2016 13:54 Fold Re: How many SCPs exist? Attila the Pun 24 Mar 2016 23:38

I actually believe that there are much fewer SCP Objects than are on the site,1 and most of them are false documents to keep people guessing. I would say the Foundation has no more than 500-700 documented, but there are anomalies that are undocumented or held by GOIs.

I have misgivings about the common "multiverse" theory, because I heavily doubt the Foundation would have the tech to visit or detect these other universes.

Footnotes 1. Keep in mind this theory seems to be fairly controversial. Last edited on 24 Mar 2016 23:43 by Attila the Pun Show more Reply Options Unfold Re: How many SCPs exist? by Attila the Pun, 24 Mar 2016 23:38 Fold Re: How many SCPs exist? sirpudding 24 Mar 2016 23:50

You can have a multiverse without there being parachronic communication. Just imagine a version of the Foundation that has some of the objects and then imagine a different Foundation that has some different ones, or look at the canons that aren't compatible; Unfounded has a universe with no Foundation at all for instance; these different realities don't need to communicate at all yet you are still able to imagine them as alternate worlds.

Last edited on 25 Mar 2016 00:29 by sirpudding Show more Reply Options Unfold Re: How many SCPs exist? by sirpudding, 24 Mar 2016 23:50 Fold Re: How many SCPs exist? Attila the Pun 25 Mar 2016 00:02

A fair point.

Reply Options Unfold Re: How many SCPs exist? by Attila the Pun, 25 Mar 2016 00:02 Fold Re: How many SCPs exist? sirpudding 25 Mar 2016 00:28 + I actually answer the OP – hide block

According to your headcanon, do all of the SCPs (except those that you don't like or otherwise exclude) currently (or eventually) listed exist?

Simultaneously, no. But my imagination is big enough to contain multiple possible Foundations.

Some of them might contradict one-another, but otherwise, how many SCPs does the Foundation actually have locked-up?

As a general rule I think its plausible that the Foundation has up to a few thousand Safe objects, a few hundred Euclid objects, and perhaps no more that a dozen Keter and Thaumiel objects.

Are all the SCPs yet-to-be written there too, like the Series IV and V numbers in some tales?

I think sequential filling of SCP files is an artifact of the wiki and doesn't reflect anything in universe. In-universe numbers are assigned randomly and probably go up to 5000. Most objects are eventually explained so numbers are also frequently recycled; it is just that most of these explanations (hoaxes, instrument errors, and so on) would be quite boring to read so nobody writes them here. Any given Foundation also has plenty of objects that wouldn't be very successful articles (things largely that do things). In a way, the wiki is a collection of "best of" objects.

How big is the Foundation per-SCP contained?

Well let's see. The average object is a fairly innocuous safe class object and probably has a team of about 5 researchers assigned to it, but they have multiple objects (probably 10 or so) that they are responsible for. So let's say 0.5 researcher/object. Each object is locked in a vault with maybe 50 other objects and that vault has three shifts of three guards: 0.18 guards/ object. Objects probably need as as many field agents as they do researchers. Same deal with containment specialists. All of these people have an administrative and service train of say five people each. So about 8.4 persons per object, maybe round it up to an even 10. Euclid and Keter objects require considerably more people though. So let's say that the average Euclid takes 50 people but there's 1/10th as many objects, and the average Keter takes 500 people but there's 1/100th the number of objects. That brings us to 20 people per object.

What's the average cost?

That innocuous Safe object costs a negligble amount to store, but probably a few thousand a year to research. Some Keter objects clearly use billions in containment alone. Obviously facilities, payroll and so on counts too. So maybe somewhere between 3 billion and 1 trillion is the total budget for the Foundation. So if there's like 1500 objects in containment at anytime that's $2 M+ per object but most of that is in only a handful of Keter objects.

Reply Options Unfold Re: How many SCPs exist? by sirpudding, 25 Mar 2016 00:28 Fold Re: How many SCPs exist? Petrograd 25 Mar 2016 00:35

I believe that all ~3000 SCPs documented in the mainlist refer to objects in or phenomena affecting a single universe. This is because although I may have opinions of varying strength about details of the Foundation and other entities in-universe, I don't really look for a grand unifying narrative that needs to make sense.1 I'm largely here to enjoy SCPs, so I'm comfortable hand-waving (or more likely forgetting about) inconsistencies. (Not to belittle other people for having opinions on that, of course.)

I don't think 3000 objects/events is an unreasonable amount of objects to keep contained for even a large real-life organization (e.g., major government, military, large multinational corporation).

That said, the whole wibbly-wobbly perspective makes it difficult to get a grip on how many might exist total. Let's take a shot in the dark and say…. 5000 contained SCPs, with twice that many things being assessed or classified as anomalous objects. I pulled that straight out of my ass, though.

Footnotes 1. Although I don't hold that all -001 proposals are true, since those are more… fundamental. Reply Options Unfold Re: How many SCPs exist? by Petrograd, 25 Mar 2016 00:35 Fold Re: How many SCPs exist? Decibelles 25 Mar 2016 00:43

This is because although I may have opinions of varying strength about details of the Foundation and other entities in-universe, I don't really look for a grand unifying narrative that needs to make sense. I'm largely here to enjoy SCPs, so I'm comfortable hand-waving (or more likely forgetting about) inconsistencies.

I agree with Petrograd here. Unless I'm directly referencing other articles in tales or SCPs, I try to write everything to be as self-contained as I can, and don't worry about building an expansive headcanon for my Foundation (unless I end up writing a story where I do that…). So that being said, I imagine the Foundation containing around 2750 - 4000 at most, but not all of them are ones listed on this site, or even the same version of an SCP on this site (maybe Iris is allowed out on walks, who knows). A lot of them I imagine are the boring SCPs that would never be on this site.1

Footnotes 1. For example: "SCP-3250 is a box of tissues. Whenever a subject picks up a tissue, the subject will immediately undergo spontaneous combustion. The tissue will then do a short musical number before disintegrating." Reply Options Unfold Re: How many SCPs exist? by Decibelles, 25 Mar 2016 00:43 New Post Permanent Link Edit Delete /forum/t-1649218/how-many-scps-exist#post- forum page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06 Edit Tags Discuss (26) History Files Print Site tools + Options Edit Sections Append Edit Meta Watchers Backlinks Page Source Parent Lock Page Rename Delete Help | Terms of Service | Privacy | Report a bug | Flag as objectionable | Update cookie settings Powered by Wikidot.com Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License Click here to edit contents of this page. Click here to toggle editing of individual sections of the page (if possible). Watch headings for an "edit" link when available. Append content without editing the whole page source. Check out how this page has evolved in the past. If you want to discuss contents of this page - this is the easiest way to do it. View and manage file attachments for this page. A few useful tools to manage this Site. See pages that link to and include this page. Change the name (also URL address, possibly the category) of the page. View wiki source for this page without editing. View/set parent page (used for creating breadcrumbs and structured layout). Notify administrators if there is objectionable content in this page. Something does not work as expected? Find out what you can do. General Wikidot.com documentation and help section. Wikidot.com Terms of Service - what you can, what you should not etc. Wikidot.com Privacy Policy.