Short answer? Game balance, I would guess. The x60 speed multiplier on simulspaces is great as a narrative tool, with what would take months of down-time in a normal game taking a few hours in THE AWESOME FUTURE! Eclipse Phase setting. Plus its useful for (effectively) instant meetings, interrogations, psychosurgery, and the like, keeping the story flow fast. Its kept effectively separate from realspace interactions, I think, to keep speed actually relevant. If cyberbrains could push up to x60, or even x10, everyone else would be irritants, not real opponents. Its a compromise to let us 21st century humans understand the combat. Speed is already a point of contention with many people, often being the real primary decider of combat. If you want in-universe excuses as to why cyberbrains can't run at x60, the server hardware might still have to be too big for a morph to carry. People in biomorphs may be able to use x60 simulspace, but maybe the "connection" process is actually a mini ego compression/upload, with your memories updated when you close the connection. The connection process could take a while to complete, making it unusable in combat. Look out for someone hitting you with a EMP grenade when you are connected! It might not be a Matrix-style unplugging insta-kill, but its still going to suck.

maybe a bit of the opposite since they are slowing down time https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Time_Dilation http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/the-bloodbath-of-b-r5rb/ but ya there are hardware problems and the biggest thing i think is that Simspaces are self contained. they do not interact with the real world which unshackles them. think of how an ego being both in a 1x environment and a 60x environment would stress out and shred at the contradictory sensory inputs.. Another good example is DF worldgen. sure we could make the history in real time but hat would be rather tedious. unstead it just runs he sim until the paramaters are met or until and abort command is recieved.

I usually assume that you can't get above 4X without uploading yourself directly into the server, though 10X with mental speed wouldn't be a bad compromise.

i was under the impression that the futura project separated the ego from the futura morph to use in their rapid sim space

Chernoborg wrote:

I remember some debate on this a while ago. My interpretation of

Quote:

After the sample was selected, all subjects were sleeved into our fast-growth futura brand biomorph bodies and inducted into customized simulspace accelerated learning environments.

is that they were sleeved into approximately same aged morphs and then fast grown with the simulspace providing sensory input as fast as their developing brains could absorb.

Who could have foreseen any trouble with that idea . . .? /sarc.

Chernoborg wrote:

I generally agree with LatwPIAT, I'd just add a few things. If the background of the Lost is any indication, a biological brain could run at 6X speeds for months. Assuming that the simulspace feeds were at the maximums of a brains ability to assimilate the information. Since the Futura doesn't come with neurachem or any other speed boosts that could be our baseline. Although the healing vat they were grown in could have enabled sustained higher speeds than ordinary- could be something for the hackers equipment list!

I think I'd go with the healing vats being special here; it'd basically be like the Ego Bridge/Mental Speed thing I suggested.

Chernoborg wrote:

For infomorphs there could be several options for running at the 60X maximum. Specialized servers like at Glitch , low traffic environments to allow more processing resources to be allocated, and running a virtual cyberbrain with the hacking protections off are some of the ways that come to mind. Probably all of the above have to be in place for full capability.

60x[Ego simulation demands] could simply be the hardware limitations of AF10 computers. Servers capable of running multiple Egos can use parallelism to run several at once, but - for example - the RAM-fetching speeds mean that a parallel solution can't be used to run a whole-brain emulation at faster than 60x, or supercomputer processing speeds are currently peaking at 60x[Ego simulation demands]. The latter would imply that - other hardware concerns being insignificant - the maximum simulspace acceleration would grow to 120x by AF11.5 assuming Moore's Law holds.

Lorsa wrote:

I'm certainly not going to interfere with anyone who wants to go by that, but from what I know Moore's Law is already breaking down, or on the verge of doing so. Once we move into other transistor technology than MOSFETs made with Optical Lithography I'm guessing we'll have another "law" entirely.

The naive projection of continued exponential growth of computational power until we hit the Berkenstein limit is something I tend to laugh at and ridicule, but given that there's very little information available on the nature of computing in EP except rough guidelines, I tend to make the naive assumption that Moore's Law holds, and preface all statements dependent upon that assumption with "assuming Moore's Law holds". More interesting is probably the absolute limit set by the Landauer limit; making some very gross assumptions about computing efficiency (FLOPs per cycle are at maximum efficiency, no reversible computing, no overhead costs), if you were to run a computer using the output of the four nuclear reactors in a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier - and obscene amount of power - it could not possibly run faster than 10^30 FLOPS. Using the power-output of an average US household, it's impossible to get a computer to run faster than 10^23 FLOPS. Actually, given the described capabilities of EP hardware, and knowledge of the level of power consumption or power-production available, it would be possible to calculate the computational power available. Which I can do. It's dead simple. The core book says that batteries have 25 times the capacity of modern-day batteries, and last for 100-500 hours. Modern-day Lithium-ion batteries have a capacity of about 20kW/kg, and a density of about 2.736 g/cm^3. With a known volume, density, and power-to-weight ratio, it is then possible to calculate the power output of an EP battery. An Ecto is the size of a credit card, and credit cards have sizes rigidly set by an [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_7810]ISO standard[/url]. Making the silly assumption that an Ecto is 100% battery, the energy consumption of an Ecto cannot be more than about 5kW. Using the Landauer limit at room temperature, this gives an Ecto a [i]maximum[/i] computational power of 10^23 FLOPS. It is likely to be much, much less than that, because the actual processor has to fit somewhere in the Ecto too. What this does tell us is that a Whole Brain Emulation in EP cannot require more than 10^23 FLOPS to run, which according to Areamontanous paper indicates that nothing more advanced than an electrophysiological Whole Brain Emulation is in use. Mind, I'm assuming that the devs did not do this level of nitpicking calculations (or use my assumptions), and therefore may say or have assumed that a more advanced WBE model is in use, or something like that. /derail