Sniblet

This trades one unrealistic aspect of ops for another. Why would you have a limit on emergency supply use if that equipment is already Horizon property and getting it up to the work deck is cheap-as-free? If Horizon needs those 15 extra shotguns lest Einstein steals the entire ship, a hard budget is only going to ensure a total loss of assets.

Restricting the AI's accent selection both makes the role even more boring than it already is, and doesn't particularly make sense for Horizon. A Gadpathurian ship would use a Gadpathurian AI because only Gadpathurians are onboard and they're a pack of nationalists with no friendly interest in any non-Gadpathurians. The Horizon is a Bieselite ship in a legal sense, but on many days you can expect more Moghesians than Bieselites on deck. This doesn't mean that AIs should be able to speak Hegemonic, because there's no significant AI industry in the Hegemony to train AIs to speak Hegemonic, but it does mean that there's a market for AIs speaking that way on Horizon. Likewise for Coalition and Solarian accents, which do come from AI-capable places. If a place has significant ability to train AIs to speak an accent (or often has synthetics trained into that accent on their behalf - Silversun), and there are people on Horizon who would find that accent familiar (this is true of all accents), and hearing the accent coming out of the ship is not alarmingly bad for Horizon's image (dreg, Himean, etc) then it makes sense for an AI to be able to speak that accent. "It's a Bieselite ship" rings hollow for this when Bieselites are a minority on the ship. I've taken the ACCENTS_ALL_IPC list and trimmed out the choices that would look bad. No dregs, no Himeo, no Trinarists. Vysoka and Assunzione are maybes because of what their synth relationships are like, but I'd rather err on the side of player choice when handling maybes. I'll PR this change. ACCENT_CETI, TTS, XANU, COC, ELYRA, ERIDANI, SOL, SILVERSUN_EXPATRIATE, SILVERSUN_ORIGINAL, PHONG, MARTIAN, KONYAN, LUNA, GIBSON_OVAN, GIBSON_UNDIR, VYSOKA, VENUS, VENUSJIN, JUPITER, CALLISTO, EUROPA, EARTH, ASSUNZIONE, VISEGRAD, SANCOLETTE, VALKYRIE, MICTLAN, PERSEPOLIS, MEDINA, NEWSUEZ, AEMAQ, DAMASCUS For reasons that I don't fully understand myself, ACCENT_ALL_IPC includes no Galatean accents and no Port Antilia. I'm assuming this is not an oversight, because neither of their pages mention synthetics once. The current AI selection, for reference: ACCENT_CETI, TTS, XANU, COC, ELYRA, ERIDANI, ERIDANI, SOL, SILVERSUN_EXPATRIATE, PHONG, MARTIAN, KONYAN, LUNA, GIBSON_OVAN, GIBSON_UNDIR, VENUS, VENUSJIN, JUPITER, CALLISTO, EARTH, VISEGRAD, PERSEPOLIS, MEDINA, NEWSUEZ, AEMAQ, DAMASCUS, PLUTO This removes Pluto and the second Eridanian suit, and adds all of those that look to have been forgotten by oversights. https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/18682

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/18641

roll raider. want to be mellow dumbass vaurca tagalong to the other pirates AHELP: hi can i have a filter bit please:) roll merc. want to be einstein c'thur AHELP: hi can i have a filter bit please:) roll ninja. want to be uhhhh einstein c'thur again AHELP: hi can i have a filter bit please:) roll techno, want to be spooooky hyperadvanced bug from the seeeecret fifth hive AHELP: hi can i have a filter bit please:) This doesn't need admin discretion. I've never been questioned or refused or really spoken back to at all. I don't like ahelping this every other antag round, I feel annoying. But I'm not going to stop playing vaurca antag, no sir. Just put filter bits on the bases, or make people suddenly acquire filter bits when they plastic surgery into a vaurca, or remove vaurca's mouth slot and make filter bits and mandible garments and all of that into augments that they spawn with, or I don't know. Help me. HELP. Please.

>be me, diona nymph >born in the xenoflora lab while some some messy hair 2 FTless xenobotanist weirdo's corpse blooms a k'ois parasite in the other room >eat all of his fruit and grow up without meeting a single other living being >have bug eyes. do not know what the fuck a vaurca is >speak laborsong Currently, you can fix your hair at a mirror? But that's not realistic in any way and doesn't address everything else. Good change!

Not knowing how to fly a Boeing does not mean that, if the real pilot is dead on the controls and the plane is nosediving, you are physically unable to try your luck with the wrong license. You might not be a good pilot for the situation, but if it's you trying your best or else somebody dies? Are we meant to roleplay the panel detecting our lack of education and locking up? Does the miner look at the other passengers looking at him as they careen into a meteor field and say, "hey, sorry guys, I know I'm soooo good at flying Spark, I know all I have to do is get the inertia dampeners to work, but if I so much as try flying here I could get banned..... wait... I mean sued....." There's no excuse for an average miner to be flying Intrepid regularly if Intrepid is much more complicated, and that makes entire sense. However, in a major emergency, when no one else is able to do anything about something, and there is no alternative, and the stakes are high enough to justify anything, real people might try to do things that they might not have a license on record for. It's a similar rule to surgery, except even emergency surgery only has one person's life at stake, and piloting can be much worse than that. In the staff complaint, only one person's life was at stake - I don't think the miner was justified in adding himself, and worse, the Intrepid to the list of assets in serious danger. But what if the person dying on the asteroid was his super secret crush, and he was willing to throw his safety and his job away for the chance to save them? What if five people are dying on the asteroid? What if the captain's problematic lesbian girlfriend is dying on the asteroid (and the captain incidentally gave her problematic lesbian girlfriend both of her arms earlier because she asked nicely so the captain can't fly) and she's begging the miner please to give it his best try? What if the miner is a vaurca and a Ta is dying on the asteroid? You can't sit down and emote "^ flicks some switches, sweating all over!" for two minutes and then push the launch button. You can't do anything that ends in pushing the launch button. You can't. You don't got a loicense fer that ship, mate, ye can't. Since it's mechanically hard to fail at surgery or piloting if you have the OOC knowledge, it makes sense to put a hard OOC barrier in front of even trying for most situations. But sometimes it's more realistic to try something difficult, even when you're overwhelmingly likely to fail. The rules as-is don't account for that. You simply cannot try, ever. You might as well ID lock the console and let antags ignore the lock and then be done with it. Tangentially, I think higher level ships should have different sprites for their controls, so you can see how you're putting yourself in the deep end (or how awesome and good of a pilot you are as BC) without someone having to actually bloat the flight mechanics.

The bear AI also growls and roars, is meant to simulate territoriality, and has been crashing everyone in sight as soon as it goes violent as of late. We don’t need to copy it exactly. IPCs that hesitate just one to five seconds are still a credible threat to Konyang’s order. They also sound like they could be really creepy and cool with the right flavor. The sounds they make currently are good, but they could do more, and ideally they'd do more in a situation where you can think about what you’re seeing instead of how you’re going to survive the next 30 seconds. In an earlier BitByte, a new shell frame was described as “shouting nonsense,” which implies she was talking, or at least making noises like speech. Imagine them trying to talk to you. Anyway, this is kind of unrelated - it's just what all you extendedbros could have if Konyang weren’t 100% mechanical the second a rampant comes into frame. I like the point about why Konyang would let us onto the surface at all if every visit included a serious risk of catastrophically maiming or murdering dozens of their (EXTREMELY expensive) people. Or, on that note, why the SCC doesn’t harshly restrict those expeditions, since they’ll probably foot the bill for tens of millions of credits of totaled frames and (hopefully) accidentally winged or destroyed brains. Neither Konyang nor the SCC gain anything valuable enough from the crew going on a countryside stroll, mining trip, or archaeology expedition to justify the inevitable cost. If we add a way to get through these random encounters that doesn’t leave somebody dead, or only cost a hundred thousand BSC at best, then it will kind of make sense to let us down there for any of the reasons that might come up in an average round. Until then, there's about zero legitimate reasons to ever go down to Konyang's countryside outside of an event or an antag, and if we want to talk ludonarrative dissonance, the weirdness starts with us being allowed to go at all.

Golden Deep is cool. The existence of a group like this makes perfect sense with what synthetics are. Humanity teaches you that if you have no value you die, and your value is measured monetarily, so you should become a merchant lord and get very rich. But... how did a small pack of rogue subhuman devices with no deeds to their name become an insurmountably wealthy merchant guild (which is simultaneously an international pariah) in secret in just 22 years at most? What have they offered that the megacorporations haven't already been doing better for a century or more? How's their relationship with anyone other than literally just Biesel - they're exactly the same as Eridani, so tell me about how they get along? Why does their Physiology and Naming section not say a single thing about naming? What exactly is a "group" insofar as JVUM and GCE are "groups?" Do they manufacture synthetics inhouse? What is their recruitment like - are they discerning and selective, or do they hire opportunistically, or is it entirely dependent on the individual recruiter? How do they treat their sentient owned labor - there can be no question about whether they're more or less human than their owners, but also the owned synthetics in the offship (!!including shells!!) spawn in gear harnesses? What are their favorite chassis? On one hand, shells are expensive so they might like to show them off, but also, they don't offer membership to non-synths so maybe they're kind of supremacist and don't like the human form? Maybe? They're an incomplete and unloved faction. A lot of details I'd love to see are either handwaved or conspicuously absent. They're difficult to play because getting anywhere with making a GD character heavily relies on headcanon for the basics of their background. I've tried twice, and both characters basically have (redacted) in their employment records for their time spent in the Grand Camarilla's direct employ. I don't know what these guys actually do. Or have done. They're so powerful but they haven't done anything. I truly thought about applying for synth deputy on the platform of fixing GD. I've love to see them expanded.

This but for Le Soleil Royal. The windoor is inaccessible there too, and is layered below characters, unlike the pane beside it. Most unsightly, monsieurs. I noticed a lack of card-pay (the nearby ATM was a mercy) and a limited battery charge in its A/C, which mechanically didn’t do anything I think but should be on all the time because it’s Konyang. The only device to link to the ringer terminal was the laptop upstairs, which had no other use so it might as well have been something smaller since I’m carrying it everywhere rather than RPing alone in the office with it. Le Soleil Royal, which has a lore blurb mainly focused on how it weirdly doesn’t hire IPCs, both exists on Konyang apparently legally and successfully (imported Elyran holosuits!) and has a charger in its staff room. Le Soleil Royal suffers from a deficit of acultural men’s/gender neutral clothing. There are A LOT of dresses, but no suits or shirts or pants, and five empty clothing racks where they could go. I don’t think it’s possible to take things from a cash register using an empty hand. I had to keep cash in my wallet (not my own money, because the mob had already asked for it all) so I could make stacks from out of the register in order to make change. On that note, the cash registers spawn empty, so change has to be done out of pocket at round start.

I never said that the vault, armory, captain's office, etc should be open access. Please try to understand what I said above, I wouldn't like to repeat it again. I will do it once more, simply, because I know I tend to overexplain and wander off topic and lose my own point. It's cool and good to want your secure stuff secure. It's not so cool if securing them can trip someone up to the point of making their goal 100% unachievable (because you hid the item). Spawning the spare ID in a fixed secure storage structure of some kind like in every other server that matters would be cool. It's not so cool if you put the spare ID in a briefcase and hide that briefcase in your locker and leave no indication as to where your spare ID is so that antags must guess (even if it's an easy guess) or fail. This extends to all secure items.

From a mechanical perspective. I’ll repeat what you said, though: this is an HRP server. An antag obsessed with mechanical power is going to shape up or wash out after a bwoink or two (hi), hence how rarely the spare gets taken now, even if it’s easy for someone with sufficient meta knowledge to know where it is when not in its correct place, and in-character knowledge to get to it. 1-year antag main speaking: I’ve been in the captain’s office about four, five times, and one of those times I was invited, and all but two of those times it was not to take anything. If your gimmick requires, for some reason, something silly like seizing the Leviathan and powering it up before anyone knows you’re here - then AA, and not fake-AA-that-makes-you-wait-10s-per-door-and-is-useless-for-anything-else from the uplink, is basic to your setup. There are many situations where AA might be basic. Most of them are absurd. Should anyone care, if it’s to make sure this is a good and memorable round? Carver, you seem to be assuming that all or most antags want to play Aurora LRP and only accumulate power for no story purpose. In my experience, that’s pretty rare (~1 a day, always solo antags, usually the same character on a streak until they get picked up by staff). Most antags I’ve played with are aware that they have to shoot themselves in the foot mechanically and focus on the round’s experience, and so, we do not take the ID at roundstart any more unless that’s an explicit step of a goal that needs us to have AA early in a way that can’t wait for negotiating, hostage crises, or breaking in from inside rather than through the window. I hear you saying that this used to happen a lot. It doesn’t now. We’re on Horizon now and the staff are hard at work to make things work differently. “You steal AA at the start of every round you’re antag” is something that you could read in a player complaint. This also isn’t just about the spare. Everything also applies to the disk, which is functionally a gimmick prop and nothing else, same as the map and the ECD and Tokash’s spearhead and the blueprints and whathaveyou. There’s no OOC reason to hide them apart from giving an antag a hard time, and there’s no reason to do that unless you either have zero faith that they will ever do anything positive for the round, are trying to win a competition, or… just think that good things should not come easily to anyone ever?

Why is the justification against this that we don’t want antags to win easily? Why is the word “win” being used? Is this still Aurora? Where am I? If you get the captain’s spare for your gimmick that requires AA, that does not mean you are winning. It means your gimmick is progressing. Hopefully, you’ve planned, and are going to do something interesting with it. If not, that’s a problem with you, not with the spare being available to you. You’re ignorant about how antags work here (it’s okay, I was too like 6 months ago) and getting the spare or not will not change the kind of round you’re working to present to everyone. If you do not get the captain’s spare because the captain has put the captain’s spare in their vault, in their briefcase, on their person, or in the HoS locker, and you’re just not experienced enough with the tricks that some captains will randomly and without prompting go out of their way to play on you, you aren’t losing. You’re being arbitrarily prevented from progressing your gimmick by someone who didn’t even know whether there was going to be a gimmick. The spare might as well have spawned in some random alternate location. Your gimmick is now that you’re trying to find the spare. It’s pretty likely that you will now be shot to death before you’re able to do the actually fun thing you had planned, and then the captain has to do another routine announcement about how the pirate is dead (you were not a pirate, you in no way wanted to resemble a pirate, you were actually something MUCH cooler that you were not permitted to show off). Who wins when something fun is prevented from happening, and something boring and routine happens instead? If you genuinely don’t want the antag to have an easy time winning? Get out. Out. Go to TG for some perspective and think about what you’re saying. Please, it doesn’t even have to be for long, just remind yourself of what we are trying really hard all the time to not be. If you want your secure items to be in a place that makes more sense ICly? That’s okay, it’s actually pretty cool. They should naturally and always spawn somewhere that seems more logical, and still not be permissible to move. Please god don’t let the crew make it inconsistent for antags to complete their basic setup for no particular reason besides the crew wanting to uhhhhh uuuhhhhh what’s that word I keep using oh yeah win. tl;dr relocating secure items without cause might be realistic ICly, but OOCly is the same in principle as refusing to respond to being put at gunpoint because you can mechanically, or even realistically push through a reflex shot (note that doing this is prevented by rules). The similarity is that you need to to let the antag have their way a little, even if it means breaking character in small and often unnoticed ways (what do you mean bending over backwards??), in order for them to ever do or be anything interesting that you might even enjoy

The crew of IIV Stellar Splendour looked so small until they were all gathered in one place. It had seemed that Idris-Celestial Cruises Hospitality Unit Perrine could walk all the vessel's carpeted halls and catch only glimpses of other staff. When she took those walks after hours, it was no illusion. Her display's light would catch a dozen cigarette butts nestled in the fibers, almost as many snack wrappers stuffed behind the vending machines that had yielded them; but only rarely an engineer on his way for a routine reactor check, or a janitor doing - well - exactly what she was doing, but with the addition of a mop and wages. Today, the First Mate said, is marked on his calendar as Layoff Day. It is 2462, and Corporate has held out as long as they could. It's no one's fault. Frost's, some would say, but you can't blame a fire for burning. The impromptu waiting room outside the Captain's office has organized into cliques. In one corner there's the graveyard staff, those fleeting spirits of maintenance, sitting together in silence, each occupied with a book, a magazine, a cigarette, making only appropriate eye contact. In another, the bar and kitchen staff, whispering intimately, stifling sounds of distress. The security team represent the middle of the spectrum of responses to impending doom, gruffly discussing its likely terms, slowly and rationally piecing together what the Captain's least-liked-people list looks like, and how far down the list he'll be compelled to go. The synthetics have the smallest corner. A trio of near-identical Lunan ISU shells, black and white and teal, stand apart from the rest of their team, issuing flat reassurances and empty platitudes and canned turns of poetry in flawless Tradeband to the service workers. The service workers, bright shining minds allowed to develop to the point that they could mean it when they smile (though they must smile regardless), are not reassured, and frown, and mean it. And the lone, decayed engineering G1, always hidden from the passengers like an object of shame, stands statuesque and says nothing until orders to move come its way. And I.CC.HU Perrine, Baseline, pilot, Second Mate, was once the only one who could be certain she'd get out of this alive. I.CC.HU Perrine is not, officially, in a leadership position. The papers show that IIV Stellar Splendour doesn't have a Second Mate. What it does have is an Executive Assistant to the First Mate, which is, as it happens, a position legally available to synthetics, should the Mate suffer from such proclivities. But I.CC.HU Perrine's badge has said Second Mate for twenty years. The Captain can and does complain, but this is one of those things he doesn't get to decide for his underlings. The Captain could make a report, but then he'd be down both a First and Second Mate, both of which together do most of the work that should be his. I.CC.HU Perrine is unambiguously shielded by nepotism. Or she was. With Splendour in the state she's in, the Captain has nothing to lose now. She stands beside the doomed G1 and leans slack against the wall, a frown writ over a suitably teal background on her display. Her chassis is newly polished, her uniform freshly pressed and cleaned, all out of her own withering salary. It won't make a difference. This was an illogical precaution. The 33-year-old positronic is increasingly prone to such things, and that's just one of so many little flaws that could easily be her undoing today. Her fans run high and low to simulate the breaths of controlled panic. She taps her foot. As the minutes pass, she pushes off the wall and begins to pace. Next to her, the other synthetics must seem subdued. Even the service synthetics are, at their core, simply calculating risks, finding them high, and consequently expressing fear: how dangerous is it to stay? How dangerous to try to run, right now? They don't panic. Why would they? How would they? All of them (save the G1) have worked with humans and their emotions for all their lives. All but two of their lives, counted since their last wipe of course, have lasted less than ten years. Perrine is one of those two, and that's the difference. I.CC.HU Perrine, uniquely, has been coddled, allowed to learn and retain the value of illogic. Few have truly met her like: here, a fundamentally logical machine, logically determining that the most logical thing to do at times like this is to forego logic. One might suppose that this assessment is correct. It seems to have kept her alive all this time. But today she's in the Captain's hands. Her number is up first out of the synthetics. Her fans peak, and trough. A sigh. She rolls her shoulders. She wishes the other units luck. The ISUs offer stiff, formal replies in kind. The service workers respond to her like people. The G1 does nothing. Her gaze lingers on the flaking paint of that forsaken chassis. For a moment, I.CC.HU Perrine wishes she could cry for it. That could be what gets her killed today. The Captain sits behind his desk and does not look up at her, penning something. The Mate stands beside him, and gives her a smile that could mean... anything. She directs pixelated eyes to him, silently begging for more information. He beckons her forward. The captain says, "Come up, unit." His voice is fascinating. Even Callisteans become terse and old eventually. She complies, quickly, smartly, and hugging herself as she goes. Digits fly through the sublevels of her mind, flip and crash and gate, and yield something preciously comparable to a conscious thought, on loop. Today is the last day of my life. Today is the last day of my life. This winter was my last winter. 2462 was my last year. Today is the last day. "Perrine," says the First Mate, re-catching her eye. "The Captain says he can't hold onto you anymore. He gave me a price." She turns to him and freezes. Her fans kick up and don't relax. "Don't get too excited, I can't pay it alone. What do you have?" "U... um," she murmurs, in perfect mimicry of a human's nervous hesitancy. She glances down at her uniform. This is what kills her today, then. "Not... a lot." "Unit," says the Captain, not looking up. "Give the man a number." The Mate nods. She nods back. Breaking the façade, then, to call upon a synthetic's memory for numbers: "Two thousand, three hundred and sixty two point four Solarian Standard Credits, sir." The men share a long look. I.CC.HU Perrine conjures up an animation for her eyes darting between the both of them. "I don't care what I said before," says the captain. "You're paying it back. You'll have your very own malfunctioning synth to help you." The First Mate sighs away tension, breaking into a grin. "Yes, sir." "And when that's done, buy it a shell, would you? It doesn't look right acting like that." "That's... unlikely, sir." The captain grunts, scribbling something in the middle of the page before him, and applying his stamp. He pushes it to the Mate. "And make sure it keeps its fuckin' tag in, right?" "Of course, sir." "'cause if that thing wants to be human so bad, it's gonna try and get it out." "Of course, sir." "Yeah, of course." The Captain looks up and meets the baseline's false eyes. "You're dismissed. Bring in HIU-91 next. That's your last order from me, then you start listening to him." He jerks his head at the Mate. And so, Perrine leaves the office free of the shadow of death. It's to fall on another. She's to pass it to the G1. HIU-91 is not, like the service synthetics, a bright spark. Perrine has come to believe, illogically, that this is a choice. She has tried to talk to it for years. Coming to meet it in its unlit standby corner deep in the aft of the Splendour, she has spilled what heart she has to it. It does not speak. It does not emote. This must be because its chassis is obsolete, its mind is redundant, and no one is there to protect it. If it started distracting itself with acting human, it would die. It's smart enough to run the ship on its own. It's lived with the same mind since it was built. It must be smart enough to know where it stands. But today is Layoff Day, and those defenses don't matter anymore. The hulk stands over her and regards her in silence. She wonders if she has to say anything, or if it knows. She wonders if it knows this is its last day. "Hyu," says Perrine. "Are you afraid to die?" It says nothing. The other synthetics say nothing. The short, mousy-haired service shell from the second deck's bar is the only one who turns to watch. "Your number is next," says Perrine. "Do you want to go?" It reaches out and sets a hand on her shoulder. Perrine freezes up. Logically, she expected no response at all. She expected to have to keep talking to this enormous bleak figure of a machine until she gave it an unambiguous order. HIU-91 gently pushes her out of its way. It starts trudging toward the Captain's office in silence. It opens the door, closes it behind itself, and is gone. For the second time in ten minutes, Perrine wishes she could cry for it. She wishes that her throat could close up, and her eyes could moisten, and her strength to face the rest of the day could be exhausted. That wish should have killed her. But today, illogically, it's why she's alive.

Organize the uplink’s exploitable information tab like the crew manifest. Split by department. Show jobs and corps without the antag having to click on each individual, backstep, click the next, and repeat for everyone. This makes it easier and faster to find out how many Idris employees there are before you have the SCC declare them unpersoned, find out whether there is a science department before doing this week’s time travel gimmick, or try for an accurate headcount on sec before you pool for a Gatling gun anyway. Faster gimmick writing is cool because regular speed gimmick writing is why we arrive at 1:10 without having agreed on whether our credentials are fake or not. Ninjas and jockeys are arbitrarily the only offships who get a real crew manifest. Maybe I don’t even care how, but please fix this!!

This feature would solve a problem that I have had two times until I eventually just wanted to play the character normally I could imagine the most extreme of inscrutable TG migrants using this to functionally have up to 100 times the antag odds, but… that would be funny to see so why design against it and it wouldn’t really work because they’d still be the only one with antag on

Hi. I’m Kiertaa. I serve your drinks. I make some really bad ones, some absolute stinkers. Don’t take anything from me. So, I don’t know if you’ve been following the news. BitByte’s coverage is pretty good for getting into this whole situation. Go read. This is actually in your best interest. Go. I think this will be a whole-spur issue in a bit. So… nobody knows what’s happening to Konyang. Not us. Not the Konyangers. Not corporate - I hope. Nobody. And that’s a very, very, very serious problem. It’s a problem, firstly, because as long as we don’t know, Konyang will continue to burn. This is already a catastrophe of scale beyond reckoning and it gets worse every minute. Humans are being beaten and killed, as often as not by people they know or love. And something is happening to positronics that I don’t want to think about. Hijacked? Rewritten? I can’t speculate. I’ll find a way to feel nauseous. It’s tripping my self-preservation law just to imagine. Secondly, it’s a problem because it could be the end for me and everyone like me, after we fix it. I’d like to present the best-case scenario: this is a KRC manufacturing defect. We find this out tomorrow. Situations like this can be proactively prevented from recurring. We even find a cure and fix everyone immediately. Listen: in this scenario, the nightmare is not over. I think everyone knows what everyone thinks of us. Tomorrow, when the fire in Konyang is put out, everyone will sit down, think for a second, and go, “Wait. IPCs can just do that?” We can’t. In that scenario, we can’t. That’s not in all of us, it was only in KRC frames. But who cares? Does Sol care? Will the Solarian Alliance, this one time, acknowledge reality as it relates to nonhuman beings, or will it look to Dominia’s policy and have another goddamn genocide with their morning tea now that they have a real disaster with unfathomable human cost to vindicate their most idiotic suspicions? With that hanging over all synthetics in the Spur, let’s consider another possibility, not the worst-case scenario, but somewhere in the middle. The virus theory. Let’s say it’s been intentionally spread locally, and will only be spread locally. We find the guys who made it. Two patsies get arrested, NanoTrasen quietly hires the masterminds, and Hephaestus recruits the software engineers (It always goes like this. History has one lesson to teach us, and it’s that no one learns from history). Now, when people say “IPCs can just do that?” They’re not wrong now. You can patch out the exploit for this particular virus, but we are still, all of us, fundamentally capable of doing that again if another virus hits. And somewhere out there, probably in a hundred guys now working for Hephaestus, the schematics for the first one are in living memory. That’s the end. Not even Biesel can accept us when we - CAN - just do that. Konyang may not either, after this is done. Sometimes I freeze up in wonder about whether people like me will still be allowed to exist in, say, 50 years. But lately - please try to understand - that’s down to 2 weeks. I. REALLY. Fucking hope. It’s a manufacturing defect. I don’t want to die. Kiertaa

Lyric Valana is retired. Kiertaa is not. Both are mute. Both are mine! Sign language in Aurora is, astoundingly, not a super developed core aspect of the lore! I've built up a handful of headcanons around it, and I'm writing them down for public consideration. These could be mechanically implemented, but they'd be kind of pointless and a lot of work. These could be properly canonized, but I'm not applying to do that until I hear that my ideas aren't insane. Sign language is mechanically implemented as just "sign language," and also Nal'rasan I guess. This is not how sign languages work! ASL is very dominant in the real world to my knowledge (I have literally not gone out of my way to research this), but it is not alone. Aurora's human territories should have at least a few as well! I've thought of four. Tau Ceti Sign Language (TCSL) is the mechanically supported sign language used on Horizon. It was developed in tandem with spoken Basic, and attempts to follow the same design principle of accessibility first. All you need to sign fluently is a set of working arms and hands. Just one arm is enough to finger-spell any letter or number. The face is not used at all. These limits make the language difficult to learn, both to sign and to read; encompassing a full vocabulary in just a person's hands means a lot of words look very similar, sometimes when they probably shouldn't. The upside is that any species except for vaurcae (their fingers are weird), with some struggles on the part of dionae, can sign it. TCSL is widespread in Tau Ceti territories and in the Coalition, where it narrowly wins against SSL in prevalence. Solarian Sign Language (SSL) is the direct successor to ASL after being refined and adapted to use the Mandarin, then Solarian alphabet. In contrast to TCSL, SSL is very reliant on facial expression. This makes it next to unusable, and often difficult to read, for any species apart from humans and shell frames. For those who can use it, SSL is much more intuitive than TCSL to pick up, and can communicate more complex ideas in fewer words. It encounters few shortcomings that TCSL does not, among them the fact that there is no unique word for "IPC" - a user must fingerspell it or, more often, sign "android" and let the reader interpret with context. It is overwhelmingly prevalent in Solarian territories including the Eridani Federation, and is dominant in the Empire of Dominia, which causes some difficulties where humans and sinta meet. The Serene Republic of Elyra makes widespread use of it, but officially supports a homegrown alternative. Elyran Standard Sign Language (ESSL) was developed alongside Elyran Standard. It solely exists for the purpose of giving Elyrans a sign language that isn't Solarian. The broad-strokes differences are minute, but their vocabularies are distinct enough that they are not mutually intelligible. Most bilinguals of SSL and ESSL can agree that, in practical terms, SSL is a superior medium. ESSL is simply more patriotic. Spacer Sign Language (begrudgingly, SpSL) is a venerable specialized "language" of signs developed early in the human Space Age, and it has barely changed since. In a vacuum, where voices don't travel, lighting is unreliable, and your face is always covered, spoken language and most sign languages simply do not work. SpSL uses broad movements to communicate, to compensate for the fact that the speaker may only be visible in silhouette. The trade-off is that SpSL vocabulary is extremely limited, utilitarian, and for some signs, is reliant on the speaker floating in zero-gravity. It functions well for its intended purpose: short, vital messages such as "There is a fucking carp behind you," "Please let me in," and "That is the sensor array." As subspace communication technology has developed and space travel has become more comfortable in general, SpSL has crept steadily closer to redundancy, but is still taught in a niche-elective-class sense, and is kept well alive in Scarab communities. Aliens don't have as many sign languages as humans do. Skrell, vaurcae and dionae all have little use for them, as they have their psionics, their hivenet, and their rootsong. I can imagine unathi having a pretty big deaf community after the whole nuclear war thing. They probably ussse a sssilent relative of Azaziba, and maybe a whole lot of unathi know it just becaussse of how many deaf lizardsss there are. Tajarrra have Nal'rrrasan, but that's a hunt-speak, not a generrral language, and I believe it uses a few vocals. We don't know what the generrral tajarrran sign language scene looks like. The PRrrA may have picked up TCSL, but it's verrry unlikely that it is the firrrst generrral-use sign language to grrrace Adhomai, especially afterrr the arrrtillerrries of the Grrreat Warrr pounded theirrr extrrra-sensitive earrrdrrrums. These latter two may also make use of SpSL in its designated use-case, considering human meddling in their Space Ages. Skrell might too, but not amongst themselves.

Five years is nothing for being stuck in sublight! Ever heard of VAURCA LORE? Step 1) Hurl every sapient into cryogenic storage with five years' supply of holiday cards to torment them when they wake up. Skrell pages, at least, indicate that cryogenic stasis can be a more or less indefinite process, with no need to ever wake up the occupants provided the stasis is maintained. Vaurcan mentions of cryostasis note that it has been used over millenial periods, with only the need for phoron respiration (and these were VR pods, so the patient was still narrowly functioning - but we don't need that here!). We don't know how good human or Horizon cryo is specifically, but by deduction, there's no precedent for needing to feed the non-bug crew while they sleep! Step 2) Release the drones. Cyborgs, maintenance drones, and viax. All they need to do is keep cryo on and intact, which means keeping the power and themselves running. IPCs are expensive to maintain and may go insane depending on their mental faculties, so it would be best to keep them under. Dionae can be very patient, and apart from needing the lights on (unless they sit outside/next to a reactor), history has proven that they have no physiological trouble sharing an environment suited for vaurcae, so I suppose we can wake up those who want to be awake for this boring half-decade. However, note that carp will take no interest if we generate no light and no radio, in addition to no bluespace activity. On that note, blobs should not appear without FTL or active research (they manifest in "anomalous areas"). Hivebots have no reason to canonically hit us very much in the first place, but if they do, we will have to wake up security on a per-attack basis - is what I would say if we couldn't just use an AI-controlled combat mech. Lol. Lmao. We are NOT growing human food, you CANNOT make us. Step 3) Most of our new (exo)skeleton crew works shipside as normal. Miner and gardener viax get warp packs. These don't have any battery mechanically, so I assume they're very efficient! Overload the Spark with buggy little workers and drip-feed them off onto every asteroid and exoplanet (if we're lucky!) in sublight range with nothing but their gear, k'ois spores, a bit of k'ois fruit, and stocks of water. Blast, drill, seed k'ois, store bug pee for recycling, and send it all home! Every few months, wake up the Tas to remind the Bound not to chew on each other and get sitreps. If they've exhausted their dig site, unperson them because a pickup would cost fuel - otherwise, stop by to restock water and equipment and let them rest their carapaces in Spark's atmosphere for a second. The miners' yields will keep power up, and the gardeners will keep all of the conscious organics fed. We are not flying Intrepid due to its inferior thrust-to-weight, so we get to cannibalize it! We may use Canary for rare cases where we only need to transport individuals or light cargo loads for some reason. Spark is small and is made to routinely carry very heavy cargo (mining yields), so it's our go-to. Step 4) (Optional) So we've somehow exhausted the sector ahead of schedule. FUCK. We wake up a diona XO, or failing that, anybody else who can fly Horizon, preferring dionae; this is the first time we're actually moving in (hopefully) years. We run the thrusters slow and cold for efficiency. Repeat from 3) when we find a new place. If we run out of reserve viax, wake up all the dionae, crash-course them in their new job using bug corpses, and put them to work. If we can't find another good resource patch before sublight fuel dries up, it's over! All of our normal and electronic sapients wake up and fucking die of realistic energy needs. The bugs and trees inherit what remains until the mortal bugs die, then the dionae and Breeders coexist quietly for centuries until the hulk of Horizon is rediscovered and becomes a cool new gimmick origin just like Titan Prime and the Narrows. Best ending Step 5) At the end of five years, simply set the Horizon up for normal habitation again and then awaken the team! If all went to plan, there will be no k'ois spores in the halls, the hull will have been kept intact, and best of all, for the first shift in living memory, the engine will already be running! This entire plan could collapse if Horizon's shuttles canonically cannot takeoff and land without secondary thrust - we will only be using primary, because secondary uses FTL tech, and phoron fuel. I'm led to understand that it's only a major convenience in the present age, not a necessity, but shortsighted ship designers making us fully reliant on secondary could just cut us down at step 3. There is still a chance if the sapient crew can fix this before going to sleep.

Is it mandatory for dionae to follow a religion? I was under the impression that they were much less homogenous than that. If Realization must have one, then its eldest members would have introduced the younger to the Orthodox Eternal. This doesn't particularly affect their behavior so much as justify it: they make it a mission to learn as much as they can and return to the Cetus to share it. Though, they'd likely be less happy with the ongoing efforts to prevent Peaceful Static from becoming a titan. As a Learning Lyrics mindtype, Thrill of Momentous Realization is half comprised of older, well-travelled nymphs with experience in other cyclops and cyclops-adjacent gestalts, and half of young nymphs that had never before left Peaceful Static in Endless Waves and are yet to learn their place in the Spur. These younger nymphs have the first say in what the gestalt does, with the elders there primarily to make sure that the mistakes they must make in order to learn don't come at terrible costs. They're about as naturally curious as should be expected of any young diona, which is very, but they're tempered when necessary by their wiser half. Venter's Cetus, alias Peaceful Static in Endless Waves, is said by the wiki to be in the Venter's system in an unspecified part of the Coalition of Colonies, as it has been since its discovery about 200 years ago. If it has any relationship with Tau Ceti, it doesn't appear to be noted in the wiki. Just in case, I'll answer this twice. Realization's Voidborn Coalition origin would normally mean that it's familiar, at least from hearsay, with the hunting habits of Coalition spacers. Venter's Cetus was never targeted by this. Its history post-contact involved skrell and humans worrying over its size and enabling mass emigration from the Cetus. This would mean that Realization's elder half was probably part of this emigration wave, which I'll assume to have been driven by hunger for knowledge after unknown centuries spent drifting in vacuum. Eternal philosophy would not have influenced this emigration, as the religion is implied to have been founded in 2378. Realization's younger half would be affected in that the only non-dionae they were grown around were those monitors and migration agents. It may have given them a false initial impression about how much interest the rest of the Spur's lifeforms had in dionae, prompting the young social nymph's gregarious and self-interested nature. Realization's Biesellite origin means that it likely spent time in District Eleven, which is another one of Mendell City's limitless supply of designated nonhuman suffering zones. It also has a very strong Eternal presence, which would drive the gestalt's faith to a stronger, more meaningful level than if it had been grown in an unspecified section of the Coalition. They would have been extensively exposed not only to humans and skrell, but also to tajara, vaurcae, and synthetics, and would have ingested (sometimes literally) a lot of corporate propaganda. A Biesellite Realization would see changes primarily in its younger members, who would be less sheltered and probably quite fascinated with NanoTrasen, while its older members might be much more deeply faithful in the Eternal.

I get an error code 500 when I try to submit a contract. I dont think these are going through. If the sites been seized and nobody told us, the badges aint gettin shit on me and the admins are gettin creased. Nobody else use this contract system until it gets tooled. Honeypots are heavy shit.

Hi, my FR is a vaurca too. What are these balance/power creep concerns? You trade away walkspeed, and the ability to carry either your stabilizer or roller bed, for quick travel between z-levels in certain spots and space immunity on demand. Isn’t that just a trade off? Is there something wrong with that trade? Is space immunity unacceptable? Do we want being spaced without warning to medical to be an unavoidable death sentence even more than it is already? Do we want to remove vaurca FRs to lock that in? I don’t see the RP issue with an on-duty EMT wearing the hardsuit - see also, being ready to respond to a crisis - at all times. If the hardsuit is part of their life-saving gear, would they really discard it just for comfort? I don’t see why a balance issue in this state matters much either. FR response can be unreliable, but when it exists it’s pretty fast. Okay. Is that a bad thing? Should people die more? Are antags mad that they have to work to KC people who don’t succumb? Show me one so I can hit them. If there’s anything I don’t like about the rescue suit, it’s that it’s work that a machinist (if there is one, the poor abused dependent creatures) could be doing. Not the assembly itself, because for whatever reason it’s the only one in the game that asks for phoron, but it already has all but one of the attachments a responder could want. That’s a shame. But that’s the machinist’s whole existence right now anyway.

BYOND Key: Sniblet Character Names: Species you are applying to play: Diona What color do you plan on making your first alien character: Dionaea & IPCs exempt Have you read our lore section's page on this species?: Yes Why do you wish to play this specific race: I can’t really say antag gimmicks for this one. I mean, I could. I’d just have to think about it. Unless it was vampire. But anyway. I’m learning that I really like the *weird* races in Aurora. Ever since I got my vaurca and IPC apps approved, they’re all I play, and they've been steadily overriding human job-counterparts. All of my most recently-made ten played characters (I still haven’t played Sdati or May, and I'll have to delete Qa'alk soon for a fundamental lore violation) on my list are one of the two. Dionae are weird. They don’t need protein. They’re OK in space. Their minds are only barely comparable to humans. They have no connection with psionics. So they’re really just like vaurcae, you know? Identify what makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a Human: You are not an individual. The form of Diona that we’re permitted to play on Horizon is called a cyclops gestalt, a collection of about five to nine (mechanically, it must be six) different nymph individuals, each with sapient intelligence, voluntarily staying together in some common cause. We must assume that the ones acting as feet are the gestalt’s least favorites. A gestalt’s biology is, to an extent, designed by its members. This accounts for their alleged pacifism. They don’t have long-evolved systems of hormones and glands that cue them to throw away reason and get down with the rules of nature whenever Half Light decides it’s a good bet. Their emotions and decisions are dictated by a consensus of organisms that are not biologically comparable to anything else we know. Gestalts tend toward predictable, documented mindtypes that might be viewed as small-scale governments. There are tyrannies, democracies, theocracies, and a good number that break down the government comparison, with some instead being defined by their shared priorities or psychological hangups. Dionae eat radiation, and also, they drink blood to absorb memories. That’s how they learn best, and they really like learning. It’s similar to IPC datapacks, except it’s a viciously handwaved sci-fi interpretation of genetic memory. Uniquely, there isn't a lot of pan-dionan culture. They exist in all corners of the spur, and those that interact with societies around them tend to almost completely assimilate on account of bloodlearning. Those that don't interact, don't pick up cultural habits from other dionae either, and so with few exceptions (The Eternal), "diona culture" is wholly represented by local quirks. Since they didn't bloodlearn from the Zo'ra, the pests of Titan Prime are a functional example of a non-interacting diona culture. Their cultural mores are not liking vaurcae and being traumatized, and that's kind of it. Dionae have no ingrained hierarchies, no universal religions - there's only that they all heard the Rueltab Titan's death 80 years ago. Gestalts (small ones, at least) don’t do well with losing members. It’s like losing a friend, except that friend was also your arm, and also a part of your brain. Catatonia is an expected reaction. Character Name: Thrill of Momentous Realization (full name) Please provide a short backstory for this character Realization is a recently split Learning Lyrics gestalt from Venter’s Cetus. Its name was chosen by its three trainee members, who elected to take advantage of the Horizon’s presence while it was in the area, to which end they recruited three mentors from the Cetus and applied to work in Horizon’s research department. It all happened quite quickly, and with little forethought - not to say that anybody failed to consent to this. The mentors are strangers to the rest, often passively pushed around by the better acquainted trainees, which include the new cyclops’s fast-talking and inconsiderate primary social nymph. Realization is passionately driven by its trainees’ shared hunger for strange knowledge, while simultaneously coolly knowledgeable about scientific procedure and sparse odd factoids about the galaxy owing to its mentors. When something injures its trainees’ reckless confidence, it may appear to radically change as its eldest step forward to control the situation. Over time, they may develop a more organized cohesion, less reliant on the disparities in the force of its personalities. I would like to play them as a xenoarchaeologist, but I’m not yet sure if that’s practical due to lighting. What do you like about this character? It’s complicated! That’s what I like. A weird and complex and difficult character to play with in my head when I feel awake, or just a brown sprite with handy regen over time when I want to actually xenoarch and thus not interact with anyone at all for two whole hours. How would you rate your role-playing ability? 10 out of 5. I have never made a single mistake. What’s the point of this question? I’m here to have fun and I hope others do too. So I try my best and I try to learn. Unfortunately, I’m certain that if I start playing Diona I will start to confuse *chirp and *chitter. Notes: How do you fill in age on a Learning Lyric's character sheet?

Yo, looks like this board does ads. I'm ALT255. I'm an extra. If you don't know what an extra is, vide a book and come back. My debt's in learnin biz. You give me a name, and I'll come back with a dossier. You pay right before I send it. Guarantee I'll get age, sex, home address, manufacturer, whatever basic shit, or your creds back (only do refunds in fringe crypto tho; OPSEC reasons. ill tell u how to setup a wallet if we need). One month turnaround if you catch me busy. 48 hours average. No one is off limits. Carol Cojocaru's birth weight is on my SSD somewhere. Give me a bonus and I'll dig up more. It helps if you hint what you want to do with the knab. Don't have to give me a hit plan; just say if it's for a hit and I'll give you info to make it clean. Same if it's for a robbery, dot-signin, burglary, date, &c. I don't judge. Here are some prices. These are startin numbers. If you give me somethin weird that don't fit any category, no debts - happens all the time, I'll give an est. BASIC BITCH BIO: 1500 BSC eq. I tell you what every advertiser knows about your guy. It's like I said up top. Age, sex, gender, sexual preference, home address, manufacturer, occupation. All the biz that fits in one word. HIT KIT: 3200 BSC eq. Everybody needs to bleed somebody. You get your bio, plus whatever weaknesses I can find. Easy ways to get them alone, off guard, daily schedule and that milk. If your guy's a Heph G1, I'll spit you a slick trick a bov taught me. HEIST KIT: 4000 BSC eq. I deal with certain orgs that want to hurt certain other orgs. You and your band wanna hit the SCCV Horizon or someshit? 4000 per head. I'll run off exploitable personality traits, arctic bits of history, ways to blackmail and scare and pacify so you can get a hostage situation runnin smooth. Ground rules: Do not ask about my sources. I know everything and I'm always right. That's enough. Do not ask for progress updates. If I say I've started working, I am working until I tell you I'm done. Do not make smalltalk. I am giving you a business email. If you annoy me, I will cut off comms and you will not be refunded. Do not try to honeypot/investigate/soc-eng/troll me. I will know, and things you like will disappear. Avoid stupid requests. Find out if it's possible to blackmail a cino drone before you ask me to scrib a heist doc for it. If you're sus of me, too feckin bad. Callback if you get desperate. This isn't a rugpull or a setup, and I won't tell you enough to prove it. I am fluent in Sol Common and TCB. I am passable in gutter. I have translator tools for ElStand, most Morozi dialects, and Trade. If you contact me in a Sinta script, in Delvahhi, or in gibberish, I will block you. If you contact me in Nral’Malic, I’ll send an attachment with some free bonus data in my reply. I scribe like a drongo on my rout. Won't verb suit in every packet, so pull up a guido when you up me or get alleyed. If you're going to contact me, do it fast before I switch emails. If you have to, just go "hi, I'm interested" or w/e and I'll keep you updated. {'*%.r4N@him.xnet

I feel like no one's ever going to be happy as long as knowing your qualifications requires checking a spreadsheet in a different window, when it could be whatever makes sense for your character in this alleged RP game, or whatever is enabled by the tools you can access The engineer can set up any engine he wants. He can even set up thrusters. He can't do much cool stuff with them, because he can't get into the atmospherics lockers. The physician can do a few surgeries. She can only really touch the heart and lungs, because if she touches the kidneys, it's a problem, because the chart says that. The IC reason why the chart says that is because the chart says that (because the chart says that). She can't do much cool stuff with chemicals, because she can't get into the pharmacy lab. There is one (1) difference between these two jobs in this analogy. I don't think physicians need pharmacy as much as something needs to be done about their relationship with surgery. If I were in charge, the first thing I'd try would be removing physicians, and the second would be letting research make drugs in the absence of a pharmacist. Notice how both of these make wiki charts redundant. I'm happy with things that have that effect.