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Finding Stacks in the Void

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Sun, 2014-08-17 16:43
#1
consumerdestroyer consumerdestroyer's picture
Finding Stacks in the Void
So sometimes a Firewall op goes south, and Firewall has to send a team in to retrieve stacks. Question: is it all a matter of perception and interfacing skillsofts and really amazing ship sensors when the stacks are floating in the void? Would a dead person's stack be giving off any kind of signal (I can't imagine they would be, for security reasons if nothing else)? Like, these things are [b]tiny[/b], right? And a team on a ship is combing [i]vast tracts of space[/i] for these miniscule things...so what exactly is involved in finding them?
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Sun, 2014-08-17 16:48
Karmarainbow Karmarainbow's picture
Sounds like you are talking
Sounds like you are talking about quite a specific and unusual situation. Cortical stacks are in the body, so they would be looking for bodies, not just stacks. If the ops died on an exploding space habitat then you could find the wreckage of that, and then comb the area with radar for any bodies floating around. Stacks don't give off a signal like a beacon so far as i'm aware.
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Sun, 2014-08-17 16:56
ORCACommander ORCACommander's picture
stacks considering they are
stacks considering they are mostly carbon coated ans small to put would have practically nill radar and infrared cross section. you are more likely to have one ping against the hull like a micrometeorite than to find one by looking for it. so ya you best bet is to look for corpses. still bloody difficult if you can't narrow thigns down to a few cubic km. known debris piles. Also you better do the damn math if it was somethign in motion like a ship. if a ship explodes its debris are still going to retain the velocity of its last direction of travel. think of an ever enlarging bullet for a debris field assuming a central and spherical explosion. from the moment it explodes you need to do math for every second to account for drift of its old center of mass and the drift of individual shards that you knew the location and velocity of long story short snowballs chance in hell of recovery stacks in the void EDIT: materials engineer friend of mine says diamond can show up infrared really well if sufficiently pure and thick. but we are still dealing with something the size of a grape and the diamond is probably on a few mill to a mm thick
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Sun, 2014-08-17 19:15
ShadowDragon8685 ShadowDragon8685's picture
Finding a cortical stack in
Finding a cortical stack in space? Snowball's chance in hell may be [i]optimistic[/i]. I would say, no way, no how, not without a damn good idea where it is in the first place.
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Skype and AIM names: Exactly the same as my forum name. [url=http://tinyurl.com/mfcapss]My EP Character Questionnaire[/url] [url=http://tinyurl.com/lbpsb93]Thread for my Questionnaire[/url] [url=http://tinyurl.com/obu5adp]The Five Orange Pips[/url]
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Mon, 2014-08-18 03:09
uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture
So toss skulls not just
So toss skulls not just stacks. What would need to happen for just the stack to be floating? Anything destructivd enough to destroy bodies is going to slag a stack, right? So either no chance, or as above, search debris fields for corpses.
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Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
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Mon, 2014-08-18 09:38
ShadowDragon8685 ShadowDragon8685's picture
uwtartarus wrote:So toss
uwtartarus wrote:
So toss skulls not just stacks. What would need to happen for just the stack to be floating? Anything destructivd enough to destroy bodies is going to slag a stack, right? So either no chance, or as above, search debris fields for corpses.
Uh... No. Cortical Stacks are designed to be very, [i]very[/i] durable, specifically so they [i]will[/i] survive trauma that otherwise would invoke the Chunky Salsa Rule. Especially since the person's body is still there to absorb much of the energy incoming. I would say that it would take a direct hit with a starship-scale plasma cannon to be sure of slagging a stack which is still inside a person.
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Skype and AIM names: Exactly the same as my forum name. [url=http://tinyurl.com/mfcapss]My EP Character Questionnaire[/url] [url=http://tinyurl.com/lbpsb93]Thread for my Questionnaire[/url] [url=http://tinyurl.com/obu5adp]The Five Orange Pips[/url]
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Mon, 2014-08-18 10:45
LatwPIAT LatwPIAT's picture
Mechanically Cortical Stacks
Mechanically Cortical Stacks are objects with 20/20 armor and 20 DUR. Total destruction of an item tends to be DR=2*DUR, so to instantly destroy a cortical stack it's some 40 DV+20 AP, or roughly 60 DV. Shooting through a body with no armour doesn't seem to actually add any AV, so as long as the cortical stack is hit, it has no special armour modifier. This is easily achievable with 1-3 shaped superthermite charges, even if we were to add the body's DUR to the AV of the cortical stack to represent the ablative properties of flesh. If you value your cortical stack, I recommend staying away from explosions.
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@-rep +2 C-rep +1
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Mon, 2014-08-18 16:09
Armoured Armoured's picture
Properly applied force...
LatwPIAT wrote:
This is easily achievable with 1-3 shaped superthermite charges, even if we were to add the body's DUR to the AV of the cortical stack to represent the ablative properties of flesh. If you value your cortical stack, I recommend staying away from explosions.
To be fair, explosions like those will melt a large hole in a main battle tank, and presumably even heavily-armoured starship hulls. So from one point of view, cortical stacks are nowhere near indestructible. On the other hand, not everyone carries around anti-tank demolition charges for handy body disposal. Then again, the original question was about a Firewall op gone bad, so if they were doing their jobs properly, they should have been using demolitions that powerful...
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Mon, 2014-08-18 16:38
ORCACommander ORCACommander's picture
Depends on the op my Vaygr
Depends on the op my Vaygr friend. an erasure team certainly would be but a sentinel crew might of been under equipped to deal with the threat. And if an erasure op goes bad data recovery is probably not going to be a concern.
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Mon, 2014-08-18 20:26
ShadowDragon8685 ShadowDragon8685's picture
LatwPIAT wrote:Mechanically
LatwPIAT wrote:
Mechanically Cortical Stacks are objects with 20/20 armor and 20 DUR. Total destruction of an item tends to be DR=2*DUR, so to instantly destroy a cortical stack it's some 40 DV+20 AP, or roughly 60 DV. Shooting through a body with no armour doesn't seem to actually add any AV, so as long as the cortical stack is hit, it has no special armour modifier. This is easily achievable with 1-3 shaped superthermite charges, even if we were to add the body's DUR to the AV of the cortical stack to represent the ablative properties of flesh. If you value your cortical stack, I recommend staying away from explosions.
If you have to resort to antivehicular weapons to oneshot it, it's reasonably indestructible for purposes of "will this survive most firefights in which I can get my ass capped." And you're not just resorting to an antivehicular weapon, you're resorting to a [i]placed, shaped demolition charge[/i]. If a guy is holding still for you to plant an antivehicular bomb on the base of his skull-case, he's dead already, and you can pop and dispose of his stack in one of any number of ways; using microscopic vision and fractal digits to disassemble it at the molecular level, dropping it in literally any recycler and hacking its safeties to ignore cortical stacks, spacing it such that nobody will ever find it...
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Skype and AIM names: Exactly the same as my forum name. [url=http://tinyurl.com/mfcapss]My EP Character Questionnaire[/url] [url=http://tinyurl.com/lbpsb93]Thread for my Questionnaire[/url] [url=http://tinyurl.com/obu5adp]The Five Orange Pips[/url]
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Tue, 2014-08-19 00:11
uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture
Chunky salsa by definition
Chunky salsa by definition implies that it is NOT a complete disintegration, thus there would be skull fragments remaining. Anything hot enough to obliterate a transhuman morph, like the entire thing turned to dust, is going to ruin a stack. Diamonds are super hard but are as flammable as any other form of stacked carbon. Like I was saying, if you rip out a stack and toss it out the window, you're a goner. But if the habitat explodes when the fusion reactor goes critical due to clever and desperate Sentinel efforts to annihilate a possible infection, and they were far enough away, like say jumping out an airlock, they should be dead but recoverable and detectable.
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Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
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Fri, 2014-08-22 04:51
Chrontius Chrontius's picture
Retro-reflectors~!
My stack, upon ablation of my corpse, shall inflate an ablative layer and deploy cuboidal metamaterial retro-reflectors which redirect incident energy in the direction of its origin from gamma-ray to half-meter radio bands. This outer ablative layer shall function as Whipple shielding against hypervelocity grain strikes, preserving my ego from becoming a lost soul simply due to aeons-lost dust from a cometary strike.
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Fri, 2014-08-29 01:48
Erulastant Erulastant's picture
Going back to the original
Going back to the original question, No. It doesn't matter if it's just free-floating stacks or whole corpses. If you don't already know where to look, you're not finding it. If you do know almost exactly where to look you might be able to find them if it's been less than a week or so (Bodies, not lone stacks. Lone stacks probably couldn't be found more than a day afterward) Longer if your "almost exactly" is less almost and more exactly, shorter for the opposite.
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You, too, were made by humans. The methods used were just cruder, imprecise. I guess that explains a lot.
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Fri, 2014-08-29 14:35
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
Armoured wrote:So from one
Armoured wrote:
So from one point of view, cortical stacks are nowhere near indestructible. On the other hand, not everyone carries around anti-tank demolition charges for handy body disposal.
And that anti-tank demolition charge has to hit the stack dead on - the accompanying blast won't be enough.
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