Erik Tiber

Really, if the heart's stopped for any reasonable period of time, you can chalk up any brain damage to hypoxia, from the brain being oxygen starved. IRL this would simply lead to brain death, but we can just fudge it this way. With this excuse, we can really justify just about any level of 'forgetfulness'.

That is a rather important point. Hmm. It could have an addendum, that if psychological personnel are not available, then they go to the chaplain/counselor for therapy. If nobody is available, they could get the option to be relieved of duty, and they could receive counselling from the most qualified individual available, at the discretion of on-sight medical personnel. The point is that they'd get optional leave. Now this isn't the most realistic choice, but it does give people the option of returning to the round rather quickly, while letting them receive counselling if they want to. Perhaps that could work as a compromise?

So currently, standard operating procedure is that if someone is cloned, you lie to them and tell them they aren't a clone. If they had any prostehtics, you go and chop off the appropriate limbs and apply the prosthetics, all without their consent. You then, normally, falsify medical records by making no record of any of these medical procedures. This is all rather extremely silly. It's blatantly medical fraud, and it's against the most basic tenets of the legal system. In addition, you would be performing a medical operation without consent. Not to mention the ethics of chopping off entire limbs and mutilating someone without their consent. If someone's parents die in a car crash, the authorities don't go and lie to them, and tell them that their parents ran away to Cuba. If a relative dies overseas, either in the military or not, you don't go and lie to their family and give a cover story about how they ran away. If someone was assaulted and suffers amnesia, causing them to not remember the incident, you don't go and lie to them about them being assaulted. The idea that we should, without consent, chop off entire limbs to maintain such a flimsy lie seems extremely silly. Therefore, I suggest that SOP be modified such that clones have required psych evals or therapy sessions post-cloning, and that they be notified in some manner, hopefully not in an insensitive manner. This does not prevent the person from lacking memory of the event which caused their death. You can simply say that people lose those memories when they died. Nothing that requires you to make people chop off limbs. You simply can't hide something like somebody dying. If someone dies at the workplace, that will definitely be investigated by the correct authorities. In such incidents, it's extremely counterproductive to lie about literally every single person that died. Simply put, being a clone can lead to some interesting roleplay. It's an interesting situation. It doesn't invariably lead to the person devolving into a degenerate wreck of their former selves. Sure, they will have identity issues, but it's simply too much trouble to hide their death from them, not to mention how very unethical that would be.

I can attest to Technokat gunning down a fleeing doctor without a single word. The character ran away, begging for mercy. They were in a medical hardsuit. As soon as they saw them, Technokat shot at them with a laser. When they were downed, they went and hit them with a fire-ax repeatedly, before leaving them to die. Pictured: Technokat ganking Kiwi.

Or something about some manner of cyberattack justifying some manner of drastic action. Maybe shutting down all synthetics? Maybe something to do with cutting contact?

I think it's extremely important to note that 'tone policing' can really distract from the actual meat of a debate, and the validity of an idea or a criticism is completely independent of the tone in which said complaint is said. I'm rather disappointed in Gollee for simply dismissing Cassie's point based on her tone. This server needs to be open to feedback and criticism. Going and nitpicking their tone to distract from their argument is not arguing in good faith and it is especially not something our actual staff should be doing. What if you're just randomly getting paperwork forced on you by an asshole superior? When I was playing as Lockie, several times Vittorio assigned my character to take a complete inventory of the medbay. Now it was not specified whether they meant the entire medbay or simply the storage room, but this was twice, and this was without anyone trying to steal anything. And he kept bothering me, repeatedly, about filling out a form, even after someone attempted to murder my character. Like it's rather important to talk about whether or not it's a good idea for people to go about implementing this much paperwork. I think we should have a discussion n]on this, because I personally don't see why we're focusing on making the game so mundane. For all that Skull complains about realism holding us down, all I've seen as problematic is excessive mundanity. This is not asking "What would a future society realistically be like?". It's saying "What is a modern 2015 work environment like?" then copy-pasting it into a futuristic setting with a few 'future-looking' bits tacked over it. Genetic engineering. Cybernetics. Transhumanism. Computer technology. AI. Many other things which are realistic to have in a futuristic setting, technologies which are developed in the modern day. Instead we have a bizarre pseudo-futuristic setting where people drive their space cars to work at their space office, at their space 9-to-5. We do not think deeply about what the setting should be like. Instead, we free ourselves of the terrible restrictions of realism, thus giving us the freedom to... copy paste the most mundane elements of modern life into the setting. I simply do not understand this bizarre double standard at work here in regards to what is considered 'too realistic'. Like we're willing to sacrifice realism to make the game intentionally more boring, because that is 'central to suspension of disbelief' or whatever, but at the same time realism is condemned? What do admins actually mean when they say "realism is a problem?" Because I'm receiving some serious mixed signals here.

I personally thought the population was a bit low, but that seems to be partially the point. The surface area should be around 3700 sq.km, which is almost one and a half times as large as Rhode Island. If it had a similar population density, it would have over 1.5 million inhabitants. With vertical farms, advanced manufacturing tech, and access to all those orbital resources, this colony should have enough room for self-sustaining cities and plenty of room to spare for wilderness.

Personally I'm with Ffrances and Cassie. I'm rather troubled by the hostile reaction this got from the playerbase, too. I'm rather amused that so many people are getting worked up over something as minor and unimportant as literally the most tedious and useless bit of paperwork on the station when adding something like, say, adding details about languages was considered to be just too anal retentive for the server. This is really just bizarre. We have a futuristic high-tech world here. Why should we reduce this whole setting to a 2015 modern office? Why is it "too realistic" to make a setting more intellectually stimulating than star wars, but not filling out your 501© form is completely immersion-shattering? I'd take more nanobots and genetic engineering over more paperwork any day.

Agreed on both counts.

I think this is a totally awesome idea which can even allow for some xeno involvement too. What is the Skrell stance on the war? The Tajarans? Would the Tajarans get caught in a proxy war between colonists and Sol? The idea of reestablishing a centralized authority over humanity seems great, and this should actually give me a reason to care about the lore.

I support this move. Not only does the chassis have wheels, but it should allow for some degree of individuality for the cyborg and show that it's a somewhat older model.

I fully support this. It should certainly be interesting! And since it would be plausible for people to use their genetic tech to enhance the intelligence of certain species of animals, I see no downsides to this. Simply use genetics to improve their brains, give them language and self awareness. We already have MMI's, AI's, non-destructive uploads (What do you think cloning is?), and the ability to 3d print a self-aware brain in the cloning vat.

Agh, this is so awesome! I can't believe I didn't read this earlier. A travesty!

Realistically, waking up bound and gagged, in some unknown place, especially after an apparent stalker tried hitting on you, would be absolutely terrifying, highly illegal, and possibly traumatizing. It's an order of magnitude worse than punching someone in the face. Realistically, it is a big, big deal.

It seems like a good idea to me.

Also make the tiling sterile white.

Hello Aurorans. Since we can now remove organs and since I have recently suggested instituting organ failure, I came up with an idea. Why not put dead bodies to use? My idea is as follows; replace the morgue trays with pseudo-sleepers designed for holding dead bodies and preserving them at low temperature. This is where the recently deceased go. Now, given how pesky organ replacement can become, we should make use of a new untapped resource to balance it out; corpses. The cold storage preserves them at low temperatures, ensuring that the organs do not go gamey and that the brain does not degrade further. This cold storage also prevents the blood from coagulating. Basically, it's a pseudo-sleeper that holds a large beaker and preserves bodies. The large beaker can be used to drain the blood from the corpse, allowing it to be used in blood transfusions. The organs can be removed on the morgue table and placed into organ jars, which preserve them for eventual use in transplants. If the recipient has the same bloodtype, they can get their very own slightly used organs. However, if the corpse's organs have taken too much damage, rather than spawning a normal organ object (IE liver, heart, lungs, etc), it spawns an unhealthy organ object which is useless for anything but an exotic ingredient for the chef. These corpses can also be harvested for any artificial organs or limbs they may have. Simply perform surgery on them as normal, cut them out or cut them off and stitch them onto the recipient.

That's for my next thread. I'll make one for roobtic organs and another one to deal with reworking death as well as making organs go bad and be rendered unusable for transplants. Also Bowtie, we can already remove healthy organs.

As part of my series of suggestions on transforming genetics, I'd like to suggest adding organ-growing vats. This suggestion is twofold. As both parts are really very dependent upon one another, I thought it would be appropriate to put them both in the same thread. First, institute organ failure. If people take more than a certain amount of damage to an organ, the organ gets some tag indicating that it's permanently damaged (similar to how there's tags for ruptured lungs), and they can't be repaired through surgery or peridaxon. Instead, you need to cut out the organ and replace it with a new one. These can be from organ donors, dead bodies you 'cannibalize' for organs, or a brand-new organ from genetics. Future updates could also add synthetic organs as another possibility, but this isn't the thread for that. Second, geneticists can grow new organs and body parts in vats. First, the geneticist takes some sort of DNA sample from the recipient, this could be done through taking a blood sample or some other method. The specific method isn't really important. Then, the geneticist inserts this genetic sample into some microorganism biogenerator and hits 'create stem cells'. Then the geneticist puts the resulting stem cells into the organ vat and picks which organ framework he wants to use; the stem cells then get to work on making the selected organ. After some period of time, perhaps a minute, you get your brand new organ. You then insert it into the designated recipient and dispose of the old broken organ, which the chef can now use to cook their specialty; kuru surprise.

In fact, with Earth still surviving, I'd imagine that many of the minor languages would still survive on their homeworld. At least several hundred, even if many of the several thousand marginal languages unfortunately go extinct (which they are on their way to doing). In space, the situation may come to resemble India a bit. Their common business language is English, although a wide variety of other languages are spoken at home. The difference is that in this case English is also the home language for the descendants of American, British, and various Commonwealth colonists. I only state this due to what losing a language represents, and thus how far people are likely to go to preserve it. When tribes in the United States want to preserve their own culture, one of the primary goals is preserving the language. If English has somehow become the home language for a majority of the population, then that would mean most of the world's population has abandoned their culture for a more anglicized version, meaning that we basically have Space America. This would be rather unfortunate. I do realize that this could seem a bit 'snowflakey' to have people speaking foreign languages. However, that would miss the point of the term snowflakey. If it is statistically likely for player characters to know another language, given the premise of the setting, then it would not be snowflakey for the characters to know this. It is good to give players a variety of choices for their backgrounds, especially if giving them this choice does not strain suspension of disbelief. Yes, it is important for players to communicate in an intelligible manner over comms. People abusing comms to speak in other languages can simply be dealt with ICly, like with many other problems. Nanotrasen requires everyone be able to speak Basic for a reason, and they would enforce this policy.

I see no reason for these other languages to be dead. Language contains a massive amount of cultural information. It is a central part of a people's identity. I can't see Russians abandoning Russian for English at home, and thus giving up so much of what makes them Russian. Same with so many other languages. Once you lose the language, the rest of the culture normally follows. It strains suspension of disbelief. This also eliminates a lot of RP potential. English can simply be the lingua franca, the common language which everyone knows but which is only the native language of a few. It is the common economic language right now, and use of English is viewed by linguists as increasing. Apparently English is becoming widespread enough that its use is less heavily politicized. After all, if a Swedish tourist is using English to talk to a Brazilian cab driver, neither of them is thinking about America's foreign policy.

Taxes are primarily based on income. There are still interest rates, those are simply the prices of the loan market and you'll have them as long as you have loans. There is a central bank like institution in the Sol Alliance which enacts monetary policy. The methods of taxation can vary heavily by jurisdiction. They still have income taxes and sales tax like normal, you simply don't send it in cash. Anyway, the majority of taxes come from VAT taxes, this is made up for with varying amounts of public assistance. The system is pretty similar to what you see in Europe. Income taxes are a thing, but they aren't so big. Corporate taxes vary by jurisdiction, but in Tau Ceti they're very low. Same with capital gains. There are no tariffs within the Sol Alliance. There is still tax season, but it isn't a concern for the majority of people in Tau Ceti in most jurisdictions, because the majority don't pay income taxes. Edit: They still need to send in tax forms to keep track of their income Do note this all varies by jurisdiction. Some planetary jurisdictions have more income taxes or have a local VAT or have a local sales tax or something along those lines. That varies similar to how it varies in US states and municipalities. EDIT: If you don't know what a VAT is or how exactly it works; neither does your character, so you're totally square. It's basically a sales tax, except businesses pay it at each step in the supply chain.

Yes. As of now, I have to examine them, which lets me see their character's clothes-less sprite. The problem is, this wouldn't work if they had a long-sleeve undershirt and it shouldn't be necessary. I don't think it would be too difficult to code. I mean if the analyzer checks the burn and brute damage-values for each limb, surely it could also check the value which indicates whether it's organic or prosthetic, right? After all, the game is able to quickly tell whether it's organic or prosthetic whenever you use a trauma pack, burn pack, splint, wire, or active welding tool.

Ehrmagherd this story is a great idea! This is awesome. It's nice to see someone else's take on these characters. So Oregon Trail, but with lasers instead of dysentery.

The station already has its own account apparently, so it should be possible for people to pay Nanotrasen for the various products.