Options that come to mind: Plasma furnace. Most habs should have at least a small one for disposing of questionable materials. [indent]Plasma rifle will do, too.[/indent] Industrial crusher. A Daitya could probably crush one in its clamp, if it could pick it up. (Might need someone else to stick the stack in some putty and stick it in the clamp.) Disassembler nanoswarm programmed to reduce it to carbon. [indent]Drop it into an average recycler and reprogram it to ignore its "don't recycle cortical stack" safeties.[/indent] [indent]Fractal digits, do it yourself.[/indent] Space it. Nobody's [b]ever[/b] gonna find it ever again. [indent]Bury it. Same, unless you tell someone where you buried it, and even then they'll be searching for something non-magnetic the size of a grain of sand.[/indent] Stick it to the business end of an explosive charge. They're tough, but they're not THAT tough. Slot it into an ego bridge and just rewrite everything on it with absolutely gobbeldegook.

jKaiser wrote:

Sell it to Legba. ...what? Too evil?

I think there's a good chance the ego in question may be infected with some kind of exsurgency, which is why they want it [b]destroyed[/b], rather than taking it back to Firewall.

The Spacing idea got me thinking. In complete seriousness, how hard would it be to rig up a sabot or grenade-like casing, or some kind of improvised mortar? In microgravity environments, that would be a cheap way to ensure the thing is never found, just shoot it into a retrograde, highly inclined solar orbit. You could probably even throw one hard enough to hit escape velocity on a good number of rocks. Which makes me realize how precarious life on those same rocks must feel a lot of the time.

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

Options that come to mind: Space it. Nobody's [b]ever[/b] gonna find it ever again.

"Huh, a random cortical stack. What should we do with it, Fellow Exhuman-314? Ten thousand years of simulspace? Sounds fun!"

Pretty low cost and appears to be fairly available. Eats through armor, so a possibility.

Also, I believe that scour rings are used as canon methods of cortical stack destruction. Of course, these are not always available.

Would a cortical stack's memory survive being dropped in the nearest fission reactor? I know they're rad-shielded, but that would have to at least cause some problems. Admittedly, I don't know what a shipboard or habitat fission reactor would look like

Well, broadly speaking, that might be your best bet overall across the system on ship or modular habitat. Maybe also planetside, though if you're on Venus, you have one other very large option, of course.

It's a shame a lot of the more fun methods are also unlikely to work. Going apeshit with a hammer, using it as ammunition, eating it... Actually... Some folks may be strong enough, the impact of hitting a target may be enough, and those exofauna-based pods could have some weird systems for all we know.

"Cortical stacks do not have external or wireless access (for security), they must be surgically removed. Cortical stacks are extremely durable, requiring special effort to damage or destroy. They are commonly recovered from bodies that have otherwise been pulped or mangled. Cortical stacks are intentionally isolated from mesh inserts and other implants, as a security measure to prevent hacking or external tampering." Unless you're close enough to be cutting it out, you're not hacking one, looks like.

I considered that, at least for non-Pod cyberbrains. I suppose that depends on how cortical stacks actually work, what form the saved memories are in. It's referenced they're part nanoware, at least.

antimatter grenade. we gave you stats; use 'em. :) srsly, though... The idea behind stacks is they're hard to destroy if you're not focused specifically on destroying them. When Takeshi Kovacs kills 8 mooks in a gunfight, not one of them ends up with a destroyed stack. But once he has a moment to pull out an Agonizer (EP term; called something else in Morgan) and focus it in roast mode at the back of someone's neck, that stack is fucked. That's how it's supposed to work in the fiction, anyhoo. If you're finding the mechs don't pan out that way in your game, I want to hear about it so's we can tweak them down the line.

Looking at the numbers, one straightforward way to destroy a cortical stack is essentially pre-existing: sniping, specifically with a railgun. Cortical stacks have 20 Armor and 20 Durability. A standard railgun sniper rifle has AP -15 and does a min/max of 14/32 damage in a single shot. Loaded with armor piercing ammo, that raises(lowers?) the AP to -20. The -2 to DV still leaves the average damage at about 20. Reactive Armor-piercing further ups the lethality to AP -21 and only takes one off the damage. So that right there is enough to, on an average shot, potentially destroy a cortical stack, or at least severely damage it. And modern sniping protocol is already to aim for the brainstem, so if anything the methodology doesn't even need to change (though aiming for the stack might be tantamount to a war crime in some places, I figure.) Even if it doesn't outright destroy the stack at range (due to armor worn, etc.) it will certainly kill or critically injure the target, and at that point a couple follow-up point-blank shots would take care of the stack. In all likelyhood, the sheer energy of that kind of projectile is going to decapitate the target, too, so in space there's a good chance even an intact stack will be sent off in a random trajectory from the impact, and good fucking luck catching it at that point. [Note that I could be completely wrong in my understanding of the rules, since I almost never have combat in my games and use a homebrew ruleset for it when it does happen]

Ack, knew I would get something wrong. Oh well. And granted, I'm assuming a biomorph here; synthmorphs would obviously take a lot more punishment...but that gun is still so vicious that at that point you're certainly ruining their day with a few well-placed shots.

True, and I'd argue that stacks are more likely to be universal or near enough to facilitate removal and such. However, the question was asked about specific methods to destroy a stack reliably, so I thought of a particular way to do so that doesn't require exotic equipment. Option two, of course, is HE/HV ordinance as you fancy, but that's the solution to every problem, so kinda cheating.