Nikov

Like enriched uranium. It really is a nuclear pile without a control rod. I've never noticed the fact, but the whole station really is our playground. That explains why I hate all the other jobs.

Holy hell, what is so hard about the supermatter? Its the only engine built on an honest scientific principle instead of voodoo space magic.

I would like the fire and atmosphere alarms to glow bright red light, rather than flood the entire room in mystery light.

I think now would be as good a time as any to reframe your answer. Also, if the draw of the character is how it will develop from a blank slate, perhaps you can elaborate on how the character might act for the first weeks or months, and the pace you intend to develop this IPC into a person?

I don't think this answer addresses the question properly. Consider how a Head of Staff can influence others.

Since the majority have voted to define the laws, I'm offering my definition. I think it is sufficiently undefined enough to allow good or bad motives to leak in under the "best interests" clause. It is also good to be able to explicitly trust the Captain, and these laws let him go beyond or even against corporate regs and actual law if he has a compelling reason. Furthermore it legally protects him to make illegal decisions on behalf of the company; responsibility lies upon the company that implanted him. Said company can fire him if he runs up legal bills, so it isn't a blank check. Being selected for the implanted posts, then, is a matter of having sound enough judgement to determine the company's best interest with sound judgement and not go lawful stupid. In theory, anyone passing NT's vigorous screening for such high rank won't get the idea to shove the whole crew into the gibber and make a NT fortune on hot dog sales. I should hope HR catches such people before making them chefs, say nothing of Captains. And while on one hand it does stifle the full range of roleplay, it does allow roleplay with the mechanic in their head, just as the AI has to internally roleplay with its laws. It might not be external, but it is there, and putting laws on a human personality makes those internal conflicts even more interesting. As far as implanting heads, why stop there? Implant everyone. Or, only implant the people with enough power and authority to compromise the entire ship. Consider the rank of Captain in the age of sail. The captain of a warship, say a frigate, in colonial waters was expected to operate completely autonomously from his country for as long as his ship was at sea, with news of European wars and politics not reaching them save months late, if at all. Entire wars were declared, fought, concluded and brought to treaty in the time it took for a Captain to signal to his admiralty that he had opened fire on a foreign ship. By the time a reprimand could reach the captain, he might already have captured every French port in the Caribbean or caused the loss of every ship in the Pacific. The level of trust placed in a ship's Captain was equal to that of an ambassador, if England's ambassador to France had seventy-two cannon in the embassy pointed at Versailles. Now that we are in space light-years from our superiors, a communications black-out leaves a captain in the same basic position. Absolute freedom of action, absolute responsibility for that action, consequences which may engulf the galaxy. Our Captain is regularly visited by alien ambassadors or tempted by foreign powers, with the ability to start interstellar wars or sell the whole station out to slavers. It makes perfect sense that the company would loyalty implant the Captain, and then implant the man who could physically check an error on his judgement, the Hoss, and implant their legal counsel, the IAA. This makes a three-party balance of power. If one of their implants goes haywire, the other two can take notice and take steps to check their actions. Speaking of which, wouldn't it be interesting to have a game mode called Barratry, in which either the Captain or Hoss's implant breaks and their laws compel them to act in their own interests against Nanotrasen's, ignore the chain of command, and disregard space law? Complete trust in the Captain and Hoss creates a metagame understanding they can't be antags, but if they could be antags, we have something interesting and another layer of paranoia. Maybe a low-odds occurrence in Traitor. If the laws are carefully crafted (and I think I've done that), then implants with laws can be more engaging and even freeing than implants without laws.

I watched a whole ERT team get blown up and slaughtered before they got off their ship. Its all well and good to game out the odds of this, but its better to let people game out themselves, in game, how they want things to go down. It should be up to the officers making the call if they want an announced or unannounced ERT arrival, and it should be their job to send the announcement, not Centrals. If it is a circumstance where the ERT is needed quickly and quietly, say to rescue a hostage, then the Captain simply doesn't announce the ERT. If it is a circumstance where the ERT quells a general disturbance and sending the antagonists packing is possible, the Captain announces it. If there is no response when they call for an ERT, but want to try and scare the antagonists off anyway? The Captain can lie. Removing automatic ERT announcements give the command staff more options for dealing with problems. But as for the antags? If Antags want to find out if an ERT is coming, there's bug kits, stolen headsets, subverting the AI... ten thousand ways to find out what the officers are whispering in the meeting room. If you don't take that precaution its on you if you get blindsided. In short, making the ERT call silent broadens the scope of gameplay for both antags and heads of staff, injects some secrecy and suspense into the process, and makes it possible to lie about ERTs for good or for bad.

Romanovium will never be called that; I'd start calling it plasma. Phoron is a short enough word it can compete with plasma. It sounds scifi, vaugely like fluorine (the World-Immolator) or boron (magical star-metal), and catchy enough to be a trade name for a molecule. What do we call this mystery gas containing fluorine and boron, marketing team? I know, PHORON. Incidentally the actual gas BF3 is somewhat phoron-like. http://voltaix.com/images/doc/Msb023_BF3_mix_16.1_to_91.7percent_H2.pdf Plasma has always been a bad term because of its actual use in physics and medicine. If you wanted to really rename it, call it Boron Trifluoride. Everyone will just call it by the trade-name Phoron.

Engineers rarely have plasteel, engineering borgs can never use it, but the little drones can print the stuff? That's what breaks the balance. Take it from the drones and give it to the borgs.

I don't consider this answer on-point, and it is the most important question. The question was not, "What is different about IPCs from humans." It is "What makes roleplaying an IPC different from roleplaying a Human." Your answer sounds like only the start of a real response to the question. Furthermore your reason for playing an IPC is no different than playing any synthetic. I am not detecting any sort of character traits, either, beyond tabula rasa. I think you could just as easily accomplish this as an Engineering cyborg, and after growing as a personality, becoming digitized into an IPC. This would make a better character arc.

I find it heartening to see a whitelist application that focuses on creating a character unique from a normal human for purely behavioral reasons, and on creating a character that breaks totally with the standard of the player's prior character. I think it bodes well to see roleplaying an alien for the sake of creating new characters and exploring different personalities and cultures, rather than mechanical advantages. That aside, I don't want to see another damned Tajii wandering around Engineering, getting her tail stuck in airlocks, getting her hair goddamn everywhere, and generally being a complete furry waste of time. The last Tajii I worked with damn near punctured my suit with those claws. And she'll ruin gloves! Besides, this is a man's job. Its bad enough they're letting human women run around the reactor room getting irradiated for a case of the funny-looking-children's. But hell Nanotrasen can't resist shaving a few dollars off an Engineer's pay scale...

Goldtext was asking what the laws might be. Here's a horribly belated reply. 1. Serve the best interest of Nanotrasen. 2. If the best interest of Nanotrasen is unclear, serve the Chain of Command. 3. In the absence of higher directives, obey Space Law and Corporate Regulations. This shoehorns no-one into being a goody two shoes, which is a valid concern.

Why would anyone be plotting in projected 2440 dollars. The only thing that makes sense is to use a currency's buying power we're all familiar with today, and then convert those figures into credits. To my understanding that is what the current figures are. Credits being worth three dollars also does not mean credits are three times inflated over the dollar, but that three credits buys you one 2016 dollar, ie, credits are 33 cents 2016 USD. Five-credit coffee is $1.66, which is reasonable given mark-up to send coffee to a space station. This also means that a 56,000 dollar assistant salary will get you the purchasing power needed for a $333,000 dollar house. I grew up in a $300,000 dollar house, there was an in-ground concrete swimming pool with solar heating, nine acres of woodland, two car garage, finished basement, three thousand square feet, and a basketball court. And, simply put, the backwater corner of space we're in would deflate salaries. Furthermore inflation applies to all brackets, so justifying assistant pay through inflation simultaneously ruins officer pay. The Captain's current pay rate is 250,000, which is correct for the job in current markets. The assistant, however, earns an upper middle-class living.

Poll updated to the options presented.

Option one. Two only sweeps the problem under a rug and three was only a compromise if one was off the table.

You asked me what I'd do and I told you. There's no reason to be so hostile in this discussion.

How much science fiction have you read? Humanity is a superpredator. No ecosystem has two.

Okay, now apply the same 40% income tax to all the other brackets (assuming this retarded income tax isn't also a progressive income tax) and now the officer's pay scale is fucked too. The Aurora is in a backwater region of space, and would so gravitate toward the bottom of the regional inflation curve. I mean, that's why the station is out here, right? Cheap labor, weak laws and low oversight? Full time minimum wage (US) is 15,000 a year. Why are teenaged assistants making three times that, on top of free housing? Wouldn't Nanotrasen be more likely to go the other direction, with free housing evaluated at some inflated market value and counted as wages to get under minimum wage for assistants? Sierra, as good as this is it just isn't evil enough to live up to Nanotrasen Corporate Values. The unskilled positions (T1-4) need to get ground under our gold-plated jackboots. I have faith in your inner HR demons.

It is, in fact, very cheap not to hire a Captain stupid enough to shout "ligger" over the radio. Why use the loyalty implant to police this? The industry was called King Cotton, and without being a monolithic corporation, its interests were powerful enough to buy politicians, write laws and start a war to protect its profitability and assets. Nanotrasen is even more powerful. If a Vauraca miner costs $100 a day or $10,000 to clone, there is no rational reason not to throw them away like Chinese or Irish day laborers on the railroads. Would the press complain? Humanity is broadly opposed to vauraca. Even better, Bound vauraca live off moldy slop, obey orders mindlessly and have trouble understanding self-preservation. Stuff a hundred in a shipping container, dump them on the asteroid, give them a oxygen tank and a pickaxe, and tell them they get extra chunks in their hog trough if they beat the 20-ton individual quota. Give them an Unbound foreman and you don't even need to beat them. We have the Irish immigration in the United States here to play with; other workers hate them, bosses abuse them, and even the white supremacist plantation owners would rather have some Irish hireling die clearing swampland than slaves. That is the kind of hellish scifi dystopia I want to roleplay in! Oh, but we're getting our dystopian jollies by cracking down on the space-racism we wrote into our own lore, turning the loyalty implant into every Captain's shoulder-perched miniature university campus cop. I forgot how much fun that sounds.

The top of the chain of command is some shadowy board room where the CEO drinks the blood of virgins. So far as the Captain is concerned, his superior is Central Command. Lets say we have Captain Joe here. Joe goes about his day, serving the best interest of Nanotrasen. He gets an order from Nanotrasen, its sensible and appears to serve the best interest of Nanotrasen, he faithfully executes the order. There is a legal and an illegal way to go about the order, and in absence of any directive to violate the law, he goes about the job legally. Captain Joe gets another order. It appears to run contrary to the best interest of Nanotrasen. He requests the justification for the order from Nanotrasen. They explain the ulterior motive, the Captain sees it is in the best interest of Nanotrasen, and he executes the order. He could execute the order legally or illegally, but since it is possible to do so legally and no directive tells him to violate the law, he does it legally. Captain Joe gets yet another order. This one is definately against Nanotrasen's best interests, and Central's justifications do not satisfy the Captain. The Captain is not directed by the implant to obey the CoC at all times; Nanotrasen's best interests take priority. The Captain is free to disregard the order without being presumed mutinous, as the loyalty implant assures Central that the Captain is acting in his best judgement for the good of Nanotrasen. The Captain might be subject to severe delusions and misinformation, and this allows rather sophisticated roleplay. Line by line, when things are unclear, implanted persons fall back to regulations and law. When the law is broken, we can always be assured they're serving the company's best interest if they are able to determine it, or otherwise have been ordered to violate the law. But of course, violating the law may not serve the company's best interest! So if the ordered solution violates the law, but a legal solution is at hand, the subordinate may go about the task legally instead of following an illegal order because doing so reduces the harm to Nanotrasen's interests, which takes precedence over his orders. The Captain may order an illegal execution, but if the Hoss can legally execute them, the Hoss isn't strictly bound to obey his orders. I chose the word 'serve' very deliberately; a servant is not mindless. There is clear room for interpretation while always maintaining that loyalty implanted crew will serve the company in good faith, and within the law whenever possible. This makes a the implant a simple decision loop that is easy to explain a decision from. It is basically Senpai's original suggestion with 1-5 condensed to a single line, allowing different characters to value different things in Nanotrasen's interest and create some dialogue between parties. Should we break the window to rescue the trapped kitten? Well, its number five, and our public image is number four, so smash away. Without that level of granularity characters can have more nuanced decision-making. It also allows a lack of information to delay or defer decision-making.

Here's my short list. Less is more. 1. Serve the best interest of Nanotrasen. 2. If the best interest of Nanotrasen is unclear, serve the Chain of Command. 3. In the absence of higher directives, obey Space Law and Corporate Regulations. Sorry to have missed getting into this discussion earlier.

Pumpkin, I hate to do this, but citation needed. You can say all that with certainty, but what makes you think the loyalty implant would direct anyone to do anything under any circumstances, since it is literally a black-box into which a moderator pours their interpretation of its decision? It is like having a calculator you put an input into, press enter, and someone next to you tells you what the answer is based on what they think the button does. You can tell me entering 42 gets me 6, but when you come in after I wrote down my guess of eight and you say its six, we are going to invariably argue. What would court be like if the judge heard the case, looked at the invisible laws written in invisible ink on his magic stone tablet, and then told you the judgement?

Do we really need the loyalty implant as the mechanism that prevents long standing, loyal, human and alien employees from throwing around insults and agitating other races, particularly if the implant causes the contradictions I've outlined? This is an entirely redundant use of the loyalty implant when IA or Central can get some roleplay out of policing it, in-round, in-character, in-context. Why does Nanotrasen even care if you're racist towards buggers? The only reason they're on the station is they can be economically exploited. Does a factory owner care if his foreman is racist against the Irish, if that racist foreman economically exploits the Irish to the factory owner's profit? Isn't Nanotrasen's interests served by being as abusive and racist towards the Vauraca as they can get away with, denying benefits, raises, medical care? Isn't it pretty much cheaper to just get new Irish Vauraca rather than pay the doctors to clone or treat them? Hell, Irish immigrants in the South were used to drain swamps and dig canals, because if they died of malaria, you could just hire another at a quarter a day. You weren't out a few hundred dollars investment in a slave. Is that too immoral for Nanotrasen?

Congratulations, you're the antagonist! Here's your objective; make the round fun for people and don't be a dick. What's that? You got arrested and are now in the brig because you didn't cover your tracks, stab eyes out with a screwdriver and set a plasma fire in Departures? Well get good you scrublord! What do you mean, "we told you to be an antagonist?" What do you mean, "I wasn't playing to win?" Enjoy holding until transfer in a straightjacket you crybaby! And if you SSD to avoid punishment, we're having a little chat later! Yeah, its pretty demented.

1. Serve the best interest of Nanotrasen. 2. If the best interest of Nanotrasen is unclear, serve the Chain of Command. 3. In the absence of higher directives, obey Space Law. "Serve" being a deliberately chosen word in contrast to obey, Nanotrasen's interest and your interpretation of it being prioritized above Space Law. If one cannot determine NT's best interest, law 2 prompts seeking the input of higher authority (CentComm, Captain). Then by default, unless Nanotrasen's percieved interest or Command's orders direct otherwise, obey Space Law (serving Nanotrasen's interest by preventing criminal acts by high officials). However, Nanotrasen makes clear their interests are above the law and their orders may violate the law, which is exactly the sort of dystopian corruption Nanotrasen embodies. I think this strike a good balance between individual initative and obedience to higher authority. It isn't iron-clad like Asimov's laws of robotics, and leaves free will and the character's judgement. Do the others who find problems with the implant agree?