I always considered space whales to be the logical extremes of uplifting. uplifting in itself seems a more "Because we can" action rather than what purpose would this serve outside itself

MAD Crab wrote:

But why? It's a break in the "realism" of the setting I just don't understand. I know some people will laugh at the term, but lots of stuff in the game is fantastic yet not beyond the realm of possibility. Nanofabricaiton, farcasting, etc. Other stuff is part of the mystery or horror of the game - breaking reality is the point of the Gates and a lot of alien tech. QM comms break from reality, but at least they serve a strong gameplay purpose. The damn sun whales are impossible at every level, and serve no particular purpose in the setting. The description of them makes me think nobody at Posthuman took high-school physics. But I know that discussion threads on this forum have pointed this out before, and I'm pretty sure Posthuman members were involved in those. I guess this is a just a pet peeve, but I just don't get it. Move them to a gas giant and they're giant blimp wildlife, which is just as cool and less nonsensical.

Here's how I see it. Hard Sci-Fi always needs a logical explanation. How these whales are able to "skate" on the corona is explained using real science. Is it exaggerated? Of course, all science fiction is exaggerated, that's why it's fiction. What I love about the setting is that it boldly claims this stuff is possible and backs it up with an explanation. It makes all of this seem real and awesome and makes you want to live in it despite the whole extinction thing.

ORCACommander wrote:

I always considered space whales to be the logical extremes of uplifting. uplifting in itself seems a more "Because we can" action rather than what purpose would this serve outside itself

I would highly disagree. We mess with the brains of animals all the time. It seems logical for all the psychosurgical facts and resleeving practices had to be theories tested at some point. If you can get a raven to become civilized, then you know what makes the human brain work. Even something as extreme as an octopus has merits for uplifting; if you can make them sapient, then you know you can make a human intelligence decentralized.

GRAAK wrote:

Grim G wrote:

Here's how I see it. Hard Sci-Fi always needs a logical explanation. How these whales are able to "skate" on the corona is explained using real science.

Except it's not. Unless by that you only mean the "how they move" part and not the "how they survive" part. Considering we are talking about a big flaming hot star I would consider the second part far more relevant than the first one in a hard scifi setting (or one that claims to be one). The suspension of disbelief required to ignore the fact that anything would burn in fractions of a second is huge IMO. Moving them to a gas giant would be fully compatible with science on the other hand. But instead we have them in the sun, again. Gosh. (and there's nothing we can do about it except accepting it, deleting it from our personal setting or complaining online :P )

Grim G wrote:

It makes all of this seem real and awesome and makes you want to live in it despite the whole extinction thing.

You wrote to key words. "real" (seem real) : that's exactly what we are contesting. It doesn't feel real when whales swim in sun's Corona and it's fairly simple to check science and discover it's plainly impossible. It's far more acceptable when scifi walk unknown paths (conscience, mind uploads, etc...) : you can stretch the limits of belief at libitum. But when a concept conflicts with basic science is easy to understand why it upsets people. And... "awesome" : that's the point. The authors chose the "awesome factor" over scientific believability, that's exactly what annoys anti-sunwhales revolutionary party! :P

So firstly, "Awesome" is always a part of fiction. Otherwise they would be mundane. This whole setting was made to be awesome, so saying one thing was shoehorned in for awesomeness is a moot point. You can be Voltron in this setting after all. As for the reality of the situation, you're opening up a can of worms there. The description reads off many features to shield them, a good half of these are also applied to the solar habs. So if you argue there shouldn't be whales on the sun, then what makes you so sure habs can survive between the corona and the chromosphere? This is of course assuming that's where they even are. It only mentions suryas traveling there to survey solar weather and doesn't specify how long they stay there. For all we know this is all happening above the atmosphere where the rules of conduction and convection don't apply. I don't know about you, but I'm not an expert on solar science. It seems real to me. Plus this argument feels moot since we know they will never remove something so iconic to the setting.

Praise the Sun.

Honestly I wish there were more wacky morph options.

Thar she blows, cap'n! Harpoons a'ready!

Urthdigger wrote:

Honestly I wish there were more wacky morph options.

Just wait till the new morph making rules come out. A friend of mine claimed to once make a slug prostitute morph and I still have the doc I made for my Pangaloid (synth pangolin combat morph that could curl up into a ball).

CordialUltimate2 wrote:

Death to the sunwhales !!! Loot their corpses for their magitech shield generators !!! I want my tanks to be impervious to anything this setting can throw at them !!! And whaling will be the glorious way to achieve that !!!

Darkening Kaos wrote:

Thar she blows, cap'n! Harpoons a'ready!

You think any Neo-Whale decided to make their morph albino in homage to Moby Dick?

Decivre wrote:

MAD Crab wrote:

Just the visible light radiation over a couple square meters would be boiling tonnes of metal in moments. There's no shielding technology that could deal with that, and absolutely not the magnetic fields the book defaults to. Magnetic fields deflect charged particles like alpha particles (AKA fast helium nuclei) and beta particles (AKA fast electrons) but do absolutely nothing to photons (AKA radio waves, infrared, visible light, T-waves, X-rays, gamma-rays...). Leaving aside all the heat they pick up you still have a problem. Since these things are all staying in the sun, they need to get rid of any heat they collect or generate internally.

There are plenty of means outside of magnetic fields to deflect photons in most of the spectrum. It's only really fantastical in the x-ray and gamma range, and I'm willing to suspend my disbelief and chalk it up to advanced metamaterials of some sort (perhaps a coupling of the Faraday effect to polarize the photons followed by a means to deflect said polarized particles). That said, I imagined that the surya were ectotherms and likely didn't need to generate much internal heat, what with them residing in the largest source of heat in the system. But overall, this is mostly about Rule of Cool. I agree though that there should be cetacean uplifts in the gas giants as well. That's always struck me as an odd thing to lack what with space whales, though I suppose it makes sense that Jupiter wouldn't have them (with the Jovians perhaps preventing such a thing).

Exactly this. Let's not forget that Q-morphs literally can't function outside of the Venusian surface. My guess is that surya can't last outside of their environment and the morphs require certain resource replenishments on a regular basis like hulders with their chemical reservoirs. Also, MAD Crab. I thought of a good way to explain it. What if surya technology isn't transhuman at all? Solarian culture is said to becoming more alien/isolationist. So maybe they're hiding some secrets that we don't know, like ETI/Factor technology. The way you say this isn't scientifically possible sounds like the kind of conspiracy theory that can act as a whole plot hook for a Firewall adventure.

I view the development of coronal habitats,craft, and morphs as a logical extension of solar research. Someone- probably Argonauts - wanted to get "just a little closer, for science !" And they developed the technology to do it. A previous thread asked about gravity in coronal habitats and while refreshing my knowledge I noted that the habs are in orbit around the Sun. This is important, because that means they're in freefall not just floating in place. So anything that has to interact with them is also in freefall and can get quite far from the Sun to cool down. BTW if not orbiting, they would have to be about 6 solar radii distant to experience earth-like gravity,that's pretty far! The Parker Solar Probe can swing by about 9 radii, given a hundred years or so that could be improved upon.

Now I'm imagining a liquid droplet radiator design where the Surya sprays liquid tin from its blowhole.

I have a whole campaign based on spacewhales where my players listen to whale sounds and describe the patterns they are displaying on their skin. They also occasionally describe social media posts their characters write which generally speak of how free they feel by listlessly floating around the sun and not caring about the mundane materialism and strife of the rest of transhumanity. Okay, none of that is true. Has anyone ever actually used one of these morphs in a campaign setting at all? I did briefly in a news cast about a terrorist faction of fall evacuees who destroyed several Corona stations housing ego backups of people in whales then killed as many of the whales as possible while disrupting any signal that may have been an ego cast so as to attempt to permanently murder those who would expend huge amounts of resources while there are still so many egos in storage needing even the most basic of pods. While it was something I came up with on the fly while a player was monitoring news feeds to see if their last mission had been noticed, my players decided to abandon my planned campaign and went on similar killing sprees, their first being selkies. I ended up with a campaign world where most of the truly weird morphs were eliminated or hunted, and people who wanted to waste resources on completely impractical practices kept it to themselves. But back to my question, has anyone ever had a player pick that morph? Or had a GM find a practical reason to have their players sleeve into one? On selkies... I did have a difficult player insist on using that morph while the rest of the players were on a spaceship. After a week or two of him disrupting game play by asking what was happening to his character in the oceans of IO, I created a nemesis for him, a Neo-Orca who ate him and continued to hunt him after each resleeving. The player never wanted to sleeve into something else, and after a while he just stopped coming around. I couldn't bring myself to allow him to join in a space campaign in a selkie, my other players and I kept trying to explain that a selkie didn't fit in the campaign, but he was insistent. Perhaps I could have handled it better, has anyone else had a similar experience and have advice on how to make any morph fit into their campaign? Maybe create an npc sleeved into essentially a flat bed truck to wheel a space whale pc around to be used as mobile cover for other players in combat or something?