Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.

How Fast-Acting is Exsurgent?

11 posts / 0 new
Last post
Sat, 2014-06-21 08:04
#1
Ikky Ikky's picture
How Fast-Acting is Exsurgent?
For the handful of games I've played in, I've actually never had a party catch exsurgent virus, which is partly due to educated/not stupid party members and I think my GMs hesitate to use it because looking at the books, it sounds like a guaranteed back-up recall. So this has made me wonder, how quickly does Exsurgents infect the cortical stack? Lets say I have a drooling dipshit of a party member who touches some tech or something that's 90% confirmed at least to have some strain of it, if I were to vent his skull at that moment, could I save his stack and ego from infection? Could I lop off the touching limb and spare the morph too? Am I missing something obvious?
Top
Sat, 2014-06-21 08:13
ShadowDragon8685 ShadowDragon8685's picture
The Exsurgent Virus has many,
The Exsurgent Virus has many, many different vectors. If a piece of device is a hard drive which contains a computerized vector but only that, there's literally no danger in handling it with your bare hands. Plugging it into your datajacks, on the other hand, is an act of terminal stupidity. Even in the most virulent but passive cases, like a bioplauge or a nanohive or something, I'd say you [i]probably[/i] could save the idiot by lopping off the arm reasonably quickly; say, within the next combat round or two. If it went any longer than that, though, I don't know that I'd trust his stack's integrity. I'd either burn it, or hand it over to the Firewall boffins to poke at, and bring him back from another stack, then tell him not to be such a fucking idiot next time. Or, of course, you could get like, six or so implanted nanohives with those hives that ferociously attack any non-whitelisted nanites. That's the kind of overkill that even TITAN nannies can't survive.
—
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]
Top
Sat, 2014-06-21 10:39
ORCACommander ORCACommander's picture
iirc stacks do a back up
iirc stacks do a back up every six hours. so you need to know how long has it been. outside of basilisk and aggressive nano swarm vectors i would say it still takes a couple hours to infect the brain
Top
Sat, 2014-06-21 11:16
BonSequitur BonSequitur's picture
Given that the exsurgent
Given that the exsurgent virus is polymorphic, has dozens of different strains, and that the TITANS have access to Fucking Magic, I would say it is as fast-acting or as slow-acting as the GM wants it to be. There are mentions of strains that lie dormant for months in the books, as well as strains that act in seconds, so really there is no single pattern of exsurgent infection.
—
Hell is other people's forks.
Top
Sat, 2014-06-21 11:46
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
ORCACommander wrote:iirc
ORCACommander wrote:
iirc stacks do a back up every six hours. so you need to know how long has it been. outside of basilisk and aggressive nano swarm vectors i would say it still takes a couple hours to infect the brain
I think you are mistaken. Aren't they accurate to within a second? EP core, p. 268
Quote:
Cortical stack implants deploy a network of nanobots throughout the brain that take a snapshot of the mind’s neural state, storing the data as a backup within the cortical stack. The average transhuman’s cortical stack backs up their ego 86,400 times per day. Only the most recent backup is kept within the stack; older ones are overwritten. Pods and synthmorphs also can be equipped with cortical stacks (though AI-piloted bots often lack this feature), though these versions maintain an updated copy of the ego running in the morph’s cyberbrain.
60 seconds per minute * 60 minutes per hour * 24 hours per day = 86400 EP core, p. 300
Quote:
CORTICAL STACK A cortical stack is a tiny cyberware data storage unit protected within a synthdiamond case the size of a grape, implanted at the base of the skull where the brain stem and spinal cord connect. It contains a digital backup of that character’s ego. Part nanoware, the implant maintains a network of nanobots that monitor synaptic connections and brain architecture, noting any changes and updating the ego backup in real time, right up to the moment of death...
It outright says it there. So you better act quickly. ---- When I was doing my searching, I also found the Nutcracker nanotoxin (EP p. 324). The entry says that it can completely destroy a Cortical Stack in 6 hours. Maybe you were confusing that with a Cortical Stack. EP core, p. 324
Quote:
Nutcracker: Nutcrackers are nanobots designed to locate, migrate, and decompose the synthdiamond case of a cortical stack within a morph by attacking its crystal lattice. This process takes approximately 6 hours, after which the cortical stack is destroyed. These nanobots also attack the cortical stack’s connections to the (cyber)brain and brain-mapping nanobots. After 1 hour, the victim will be aware that their cortical stack is threatened. After 3 hours, all connections will be severed and the cortical stack will no longer be able to back up the character. [High]
Top
Sat, 2014-06-21 12:32
ORCACommander ORCACommander's picture
yep mixed it up with the
yep mixed it up with the nutcracker :P
Top
Sat, 2014-06-21 14:17
Ikky Ikky's picture
Amputation solves everything
Good to know I have the chance to save my group's stacks and morphs! Coming back from backup is one of those things I really fear as a player, because it's skill and Rez backtracking, losing session RP experience and why I make a lot of my characters religious so they don't go fork-crazy.
Top
Sat, 2014-06-21 17:55
Lorsa Lorsa's picture
If you follow the rules to
If you follow the rules to the letter, it is very hard for a high durability / medichined morph to actually contract the exurgent virus from casual contact. Even so I would let you save the ego by quick destruction and rescue of the cortical stack. The only answer the book gives us for how fast the exurgent virus acts seems to be "whichever way gives most tension in your campaign".
—
Lorsa is a Forum moderator [color=red]Red text is for moderator stuff[/color]
Top
Mon, 2014-06-23 22:35
jackgraham jackgraham's picture
We have mechanical
We have mechanical descriptions of some of the strains in the books. But when I'm GM'ing, I'm a lot meaner.
—
J A C K   G R A H A M :: Hooray for Earth!   http://eclipsephase.com :: twitter @jackgraham @faketsr :: Google+Jack Graham
Top
Tue, 2014-06-24 04:55
Myrmidont Myrmidont's picture
Blood circulation
The fastest way to travel around a transhuman body is likely blood circulation. So that gives us a bit of a guideline: (via google)
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/questions/question/3418/ wrote:
You have about 5 litres of blood in your body (at least most people do) and the average heart pumps about 70 ml of blood out with each beat. The next bit is going to depend on your resting heart rate. I think most people have an average resting heart rate of about 70 beats a minute (somewhere around there). So, if you multiply the amount of blood that the heart can pump by the number of beats in a minute, you actually get about 4.9 litres of blood, which is almost your whole body’s worth of blood. So, in a minute, you will pump the entire blood volume around your body.
Of course, H+ could have larger hearts (for robustness in various pressures and gravities) and I'm betting any typical encounter with Exurgents will put your pulse over 100bpm. So blood from an infection site could be carried throughout the body in maybe 30 seconds. If your hypothetical dumb-as-a-doorknob buddy stuck his hand an a vat of Exurgent, I'd give it a round to amputate at the shoulder, or shred his head and recover his stack within two rounds.
—
[@-rep +0|c-rep +0|f-rep +0|g-rep +0|i-rep +0|r-rep +0|x-rep +0] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/theeye_fanzine_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/reints_userbar.jpg[/img]
Top
Wed, 2014-06-25 03:24
Ikky Ikky's picture
I was the dumbass
I actually had a chance to test this today, unwittingly. Campaign I'm in, did a side-plot to look for old childhood hab salvage or survivors and looked to a salvage company on the local area we're in, maybe they have a clue, right? Find the corpse of a suicide in their office, that's okay, fondle the corpse looking for a 'stack, there is no 'stack. Jack into their ecto looking for hints, There ain't shit but a suicide note recording about an infection, whispers in the head and bad salvage that drove the whole team to this state...Well! Being of rightfully scared mind, I order my muse to delete any temp or registry data that comes from that ecto, and to override all safeties on the airlock to the office because my hands are now a vector and just...let the door sheer them off, turns out that saved my morph and stack from further infection (Even if it was just YGBM strain but that's the worst risk to take). So, yeah, have fun cleaving off each other's limbs, it works!
Top