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Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?

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Tue, 2009-10-13 20:46
#1
Hakkonen Hakkonen's picture
Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
OK, the grape-sized cortical stack is plausible. There's enough room at the base of the skull to stick something that small in there and have it be relatively unobtrusive, especially if your morph was designed to accommodate it. But something the size of an orange? C'mon. I don't know about you guys, but the oranges I'm familiar with are three to four inches in diameter, sometimes more. That's a sizable fraction of your skull's internal volume. How much of your brain do they have to take out to make room for this thing, and do you miss it? Or do all morphs just have gigantic braincases?
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Wed, 2009-10-14 08:53
fimbulwinter fimbulwinter's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
Why's the farcaster have to be in your head? The cortical stack's there for convenience's sake (though I suspect it wouldn't have to be) but you could just connect the stack to an orange-sized implant in the torso, couldn't you? And-speaking as a greengrocer-there may not be room in your morph's head for an orange, but there's certainly room for debate about the size of oranges. Are we talking Navels, Valencias, what? Blood oranges? What kind? Moro tend to be smaller, but that's just on average. And are we talking organic or conventional oranges? It doesn't matter, but I'd like to know just for the sake of verisimilitude. Just trying to be helpful, and pithy. Orange you glad you asked?
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I am a feminist, a nominalist,a pacifist, a meritocrat, a 10th level greengrocer, and as full of shit as 50 horses. I cannot be killed. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or num
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Wed, 2009-10-14 15:45
Hakkonen Hakkonen's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
In "Lack" when Sava uses her emergency farcaster, it explicitly says that her head explodes. This leads me to conclude that the farcaster's antimatter reserve was, indeed, located either inside her head or at the top of her spine, neither of which have space for something several inches across without some fairly radical replumbing. Of course, a case could be made that the story is just fluff and therefore not necessarily canon, but in the absence of a definitive dev ruling, I tend to take it at face value. I don't know anything about the different species of orange. What's the most common? Please lay off the bad puns. :P
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Fri, 2009-10-16 16:38
Aulyenye Aulyenye's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
I wonder if maybe the whole thing is the side of the orange but the parts can be split up and shifted about. This would keep with the size and location of certain parts. Just a thought.
—

"Jumping from high ledges without anticipation of fatal impact is
commonly know to be an unwise activity and is not
recommended by the legal team of Aperture, Inc"
Portal the game.

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Tue, 2009-10-20 07:35
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
Aulyenye wrote:
I wonder if maybe the whole thing is the side of the orange but the parts can be split up and shifted about. This would keep with the size and location of certain parts. Just a thought.
In other words: size of an orange ≠ shape of an orange.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Tue, 2009-10-20 15:17
fimbulwinter fimbulwinter's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
It occurs to me that food makes for a remarkably universal metric of size/mass/shape, doesn't it? Thinking about life in the future and the necessity of units that transcend language, culture and class...food (particularly produce) is one of the few things that does that. Will it still be like that in the EP future? Will everyone be eating oranges? Will the size of an orange make for a viable measurement of size/mass/shape...or will every piece of fruit or vegetable be engineered to conform to a more arbitrary metric. Oranges that are exactly 300 grams in mass, for example, or how each Bananas Furiosas' curve describes the perfect angle for Martian orbital re-entry w/ a minimum of aerobraking... Sorry, just yammering on. Don't beet me up about it.
—
I am a feminist, a nominalist,a pacifist, a meritocrat, a 10th level greengrocer, and as full of shit as 50 horses. I cannot be killed. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or num
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Thu, 2009-10-22 01:13
Alhazred Alhazred's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
Sava's head did explode, but that wasn't necissarily the transmitter itself. It was mentioned earlier that she(?) was very much against forking, so she could have rigged a separate charge to vaporise her stack as soon as the burst trasmission was complete. This would be especially important in a place full of bots whose main mission is to steal stacks for forced uploading.
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Thu, 2009-10-22 13:51
Aulyenye Aulyenye's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
it's also possible that it was the power supply of the transmitter as it does mention containing some anti-matter.
—

"Jumping from high ledges without anticipation of fatal impact is
commonly know to be an unwise activity and is not
recommended by the legal team of Aperture, Inc"
Portal the game.

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Thu, 2009-10-22 17:13
Hakkonen Hakkonen's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
Eclipse Phase, p.307 explicitly says that the antimatter which powers the implant is stored "in an orange-sized triply-redundant magnetic containment vessel." Because of the way magnetic containment works, such a vessel would basically have to be spherical, so in this case, "size of an orange" does actually equal "shape of an orange." And again, the end of "Lack" makes it pretty clear that the antimatter vessel was located inside Sava's head or at the top of her spine, neither of which is plausible. Sure, it's [i]possible[/i] that a separate charge caused the explosion; it's also [i]possible[/i] that a robot managed to sneak into the room and blow Sava's head off just as she was making the transmission. Since neither is mentioned, however, I disparage both possibilities. I see no other reasonable way to read the event than that the matter-antimatter annihilation reaction powering the farcaster caused Sava's head to explode, which necessarily places the antimatter storage unit inside her skull or at the top of her spine. Is this an example of [url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScal... Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale[/url] or what?
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Thu, 2009-10-22 17:42
Aulyenye Aulyenye's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
oh.. totally missed that and yeah since it's definately the power source that is that size then you are prolly right. The only instances I can see that would work would be if cyberbrains are smaller then normal organic ones (haven't read specificly about this) which leaves Pods and synth's
—

"Jumping from high ledges without anticipation of fatal impact is
commonly know to be an unwise activity and is not
recommended by the legal team of Aperture, Inc"
Portal the game.

Top
Fri, 2009-10-23 22:56
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
Hakkonen wrote:
Eclipse Phase, p.307 explicitly says that the antimatter which powers the implant is stored "in an orange-sized triply-redundant magnetic containment vessel." Because of the way magnetic containment works, such a vessel would basically have to be spherical, so in this case, "size of an orange" does actually equal "shape of an orange." And again, the end of "Lack" makes it pretty clear that the antimatter vessel was located inside Sava's head or at the top of her spine, neither of which is plausible. Sure, it's [i]possible[/i] that a separate charge caused the explosion; it's also [i]possible[/i] that a robot managed to sneak into the room and blow Sava's head off just as she was making the transmission. Since neither is mentioned, however, I disparage both possibilities. I see no other reasonable way to read the event than that the matter-antimatter annihilation reaction powering the farcaster caused Sava's head to explode, which necessarily places the antimatter storage unit inside her skull or at the top of her spine. Is this an example of [url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScal... Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale[/url] or what?
Considering that antimatter does require a large magnetic containment vessel comparative to its mass, I'd say they got it right. However, magnetic containment does not have to be a spherical device... it can take on cylindrical or even disk-like shapes. That said, I think it fair to note that while emergency farcasters are mental augmentations, there is no reason they cannot be implanted elsewhere in the body and attached to the brain. Moreover, it's also fair to note that emergency farcasters produce enough heat to cook the [b]entire body[/b], not just the head. Sava's head exploding in "Lack" could have simply been a byproduct of an undescribed destructive effect on his entire body... not unlike a chili-cheese burrito when one end explodes in the microwave.
—
Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Sat, 2009-10-24 14:28
Bloodwork Bloodwork's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
I cite this article http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm Essentially it doesn't really matter if the device is shaped like a banana or a bowling ball as long as it makes good fiction.
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That which doesn't kill you usually succeeds on the second attempt.
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Fri, 2009-10-30 17:44
verdra verdra's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
while the containment vessel is oragne sized. the reaction site could be located in the head, ths exploding the head; though i really like the chili-cheese burrito description
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Sat, 2009-11-07 05:32
Aleksander Aleksander's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
I think that by writing "orange-sized" authors just wanted to emphasize that it can't be cut out as easily as grape-sized cortial stack. So, for me it's another grape-sized implant hidden deeper inside a skull, so that noone can pull it out. Simple ;)
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Sat, 2009-11-07 06:25
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Emergency farcaster implant: "orange-sized?" Really?
Aleksander wrote:
I think that by writing "orange-sized" authors just wanted to emphasize that it can't be cut out as easily as grape-sized cortial stack. So, for me it's another grape-sized implant hidden deeper inside a skull, so that noone can pull it out. Simple ;)
I think the more logical answer is that the implant isn't placed in the head, only that it is connected to the brain while being placed elsewhere. Remember, it's basically just a transmitter connected to the mind... the transmitter doesn't actually have to be [i]in the mind[/i]. More importantly, it wouldn't make sense for it to be so small, because it is also an antimatter containment unit (that is what powers it).
—
Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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