Missing Inventions? | Eclipse Phase

Tue, 2011-03-01 03:49

#2

Decivre

Re: Missing Inventions?

Jay Dugger wrote:
Eclipse Phase models itself after various sources. Check its bibliography for details. Certain inventions, hypothetically possible, and consistent with the setting do not appear. I evaluate the following for use in the campaign I now run. If you've good reasons that don't violate suspension of disbelief for these to NOT appear in-game, please say so. Phased array optics Programmable matter Hall's weather machine Hall's utility fog Lofstrom's Server Sky If you need links, just post and ask.

All of these exist in some form or another. Programmable matter comes in two forms: smart materials (human-produced) and computronium (TITAN produced). Phased-array optics hasn't been addressed, but hasn't been discounted within the setting. Both Hall's weather machine and utility fog exists in the form of TITAN nanoswarms which control the weather on Earth, and are capable of solidifying for various tasks. Server sky largely exists already since the majority of inner system society is solar-powered.

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Tue, 2011-03-01 18:01

#3

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Missing Inventions?

Jay Dugger wrote:
Phased array optics Programmable matter Hall's weather machine Hall's utility fog Lofstrom's Server Sky

In my write-up of space warfare phased array optics is one of my basic assumptions. Seems entirely doable given the nanotech and the metamaterials. Programmable matter depends on what kind of programmable matter you mean. Claytronics and various smart nanomaterials ought to work fine. I am less convinced about McCarthy's wellstone: although having a lot of quantum wells that can be controlled using nanostructures is entirely plausible I don't think that will produce much of bulk properties. So I would argue that you could make smart finishes that behave like real or fictional matter, but are only nanometre thick. Hall's weather machine seems to be quite doable (just a big nanoswarm). I wouldn't be surprised if there was one or more on Earth before the Fall (when it turned evil, of course) and it might make a lot of sense at least on Mars - except that post-Fall nobody wants to give it too much freedom of action, making it hard to use effectively. Utility fogs seem to be slightly outside human capability but well within TITAN capability. Swarmanoids (and my Quicksilver morph) are clearly aiming towards getting there within a few years. I haven't heard about the server sky before this, but I love the idea. Somewhat problematic lags, but a nice Dysonesque take on how to distribute servers. Unfortunately this is also something that the exsurgent virus or other nasties would gobble up with frightening speed. I can imagine Earth having had a server sky before the Fall. Today they are of course strongly banned. So I have no problems accepting them in the game, except for limiting the power of the programmable matter. Compared to psi, the gate mechanics and writing egos to biological brains they are diamond-hard.

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Wed, 2011-03-02 14:09

#4

Jay Dugger Jay Dugger's picture

Re: Missing Inventions?

I need to find which of these missing inventions strain suspension of disbelief, and I use this thread as a proxy for my players.

Spoiler: Highlight to view

The campaign I run, Martian Autumn, covers the Second Fall, a Martian world war that leaves the planet uninhabitable. The PCs spark the conflict as a side effect of their own agendas. The various missing inventions all might see use as weapons by different factions. If the missing inventions strain credulity, then they've little dramatic use.

Quote:
In my write-up of space warfare phased array optics is one of my basic assumptions. Seems entirely doable given the nanotech and the metamaterials.

I haven't seen your space warfare write-up. Do you have a handy link? I hadn't thought of space war, and I'd assume PAO let you rationalize useful ranges for lasers. Generally PAO make me worry that any decently powerful array can get used, at least once, as a laser weapon. If you've a wall-sized array, that's great home defense. (Probably sells nicely in Extropia.) If you've an exterior building wall or large vehicle bulkhead covered in PAO, then you've good anti-personnel weapons, as disorienting strobes or for area denial. If you've an array used for high-energy laser lift, such as at the Olympus elevator, you've got excellent anti-aircraft weapons, like Raytheon's proposed Vigilant Eagle. Oh--you can use them as sensors or electronic/information warfare weapons, in fashion analogous to modern AESA. I had McCarthy's wellstone in mind. I don't find his bulk properties claims terribly convincing either. If you can simulate the outer orbital energy levels, that's very neat solid state physics and perhaps even novel chemistry. I am not physicist nor chemist enough to critique that point. They seem too fragile to have much practical use beyond very fragile finishes, perhaps displays, and possibly exotic programmable catalysts. The first two count as stage dressing, and that last seems dramatically irrelevant. Hall's weather machine and Lofstrom's server sky both seem to have the same problems. Easy to subvert by TITANs or Exsurgents, easy enough to build, and past a certain low minimum--easy to weaponize. A substantial sudden deployment of either might destabilize power balances. How would you find out if someone was planning such a thing? Utility fogs don't seem that hard to do in comparison to swarmanoids. And they'd be so very useful in microgravity! Leaving them off-stage will probably work, though. It also occurs to me that atomic explosives ought to be fairly easy to make. Energy seems cheap enough and technology high enough to make compact neutron sources practical. I shudder at the thought of pee-wee nukes as common as car bombs. Of course, in the outer system self-interest and distance make these less of a problem. In the inner system, the Planetary Consortium probably watches for anything not used strictly for legitimate civil engineering.

Spoiler: Highlight to view

Once the unrestricted cornucopia machines get loose on Mars in Martian Autumn, the slang term "Saturday Night Special" will refer to a more potent weapon than a cheap handgun.

Gates and psis are by house convention off-stage elements. I.e., they exist in setting but will not appear in play except as stage dressing. Thanks for the input.

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Sometimes the delete key serves best.

Wed, 2011-03-02 16:25

#5

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Missing Inventions?

Jay Dugger wrote:
I haven't seen your space warfare write-up. Do you have a handy link?

Not yet, I need to finish checking my calculations. Real soon now.

Quote:
Generally PAO make me worry that any decently powerful array can get used, at least once, as a laser weapon. If you've a wall-sized array, that's great home defense.

The reasons to have a big PAO is 1) you can send a more high power beam without having enormous power per square meter in the array, 2) the diffraction length becomes larger, so it can aim further. When used as a sensor it also gets better depth perception, which is good when working as a lidar or targeting system. If it has good enough timing it can do cool things like sending laser patterns that are indirectly deflected into unseen areas and then the echoes can be decoded to get a crude picture of what is hidden behind walls. Spray-on PAO sounds like a fun nanotech product. Spray it on, connect it to a power cable, allow the nanobatteries to charge up and you have an instant gun emplacement good for a few shots.

Quote:
Hall's weather machine and Lofstrom's server sky both seem to have the same problems. Easy to subvert by TITANs or Exsurgents, easy enough to build, and past a certain low minimum--easy to weaponize. A substantial sudden deployment of either might destabilize power balances. How would you find out if someone was planning such a thing?

They would need to be nanofactured and released. Nanofacture takes a bit of infrastructure but can probably be hidden as something normal. It is spreading out the weather aerostats and server flakes that is tough: they will not be moving that fast, and people will figure out what is going on. As long as they are slow-moving they can likely be hit and stopped. However, a drip approach might work: small facilities making small amounts, slowly filling the atmosphere/space until somebody notices, then switching to "what the heck mode" and ramping up production.

Quote:
It also occurs to me that atomic explosives ought to be fairly easy to make. Energy seems cheap enough and technology high enough to make compact neutron sources practical. I shudder at the thought of pee-wee nukes as common as car bombs.

You need to get the isotopes, and I doubt they are in the usual nanofab feedstock. Making a deuterium filtering machine is probably doable, but you need a fission trigger and for that you need plenty of tons of uranium ore or old nuclear fuel.

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Thu, 2011-03-10 03:21

#6

MirrorField MirrorField's picture

Re: Missing Inventions?

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It also occurs to me that atomic explosives ought to be fairly easy to make. Energy seems cheap enough and technology high enough to make compact neutron sources practical. I shudder at the thought of pee-wee nukes as common as car bombs.
You need to get the isotopes, and I doubt they are in the usual nanofab feedstock. Making a deuterium filtering machine is probably doable, but you need a fission trigger and for that you need plenty of tons of uranium ore or old nuclear fuel.

Not necessarily, IMHO. One would think that with EP-level nanotech filtering isotopes would be rather easy. You don't necessarily want or need uranium, but Deuterium which combines nicely with one-shot laser diode or plasma explosive into a pure fusion warhead. Yes, the term "saturday night special" (hat tip to Vernor Vinge) is quite probably decidedly unfunny in AF10 solar system. And while they've seen sporadic use and (IMHO) AF10 has much less "nuclear stigma" than today, people tend to hold extremely dim views on people carelessly using those. ObRecommendation: Iron Sunrise by Charlie Stross. The Incident on first few chapters should be quite enlightening for prospective GMs. Few points about people playing with nukes: *It is impossible to conceal setting off one outside improbable and extreme edge cases. Everyone will find out about it. *Lots of well-funded, extremely skilled people with nasty hardware and practically unlimited budgets will be taking interest on general principles. (No, we're not taking about Firewall and/or Ozma though they'll probably be in line.) *Even Firewall Erasure Squads try to avoid using them unless there's really no choice. They're simply too conspicuous.

Tue, 2011-10-04 23:03

#7

Jay Dugger Jay Dugger's picture

Re: Missing Inventions?

Another missing invention occurs to me. Greg Egan's early books, 1992's Quarantine in particular, have interesting brain modifications. I think of Sentinel, P3, and the Ensemble. 1) Have I missed these in Eclipse Phase? 2) Do they exist as a implied subset of psychosurgery?

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Sometimes the delete key serves best.

Wed, 2011-10-05 03:12

#8

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Missing Inventions?

Jay Dugger wrote:
Another missing invention occurs to me. Greg Egan's early books, 1992's Quarantine in particular, have interesting brain modifications. I think of Sentinel, P3, and the Ensemble. 1) Have I missed these in Eclipse Phase? 2) Do they exist as a implied subset of psychosurgery?

Well, Ensemble sounds like something derived from Watts-Macleod. More of a new mcguffin than normal equipment. I think the others can be done with psychosurgery, with some effort. Maybe Quarantine's modifications show how you could package such psychosurgery mods together.

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Wed, 2011-10-05 22:53

#9

Jay Dugger Jay Dugger's picture

Re: Missing Inventions?

Quote:
Well, Ensemble sounds like something derived from Watts-Macleod. More of a new mcguffin than normal equipment.

Good point. I forgot about the probability-manipulating aspect of Ensemble. I dislike psionics in Eclipse Phase, and they do not appear in my campaign. Do you judge Ensemble only as loyalty therapy strains suspension of disbelief? It seems plausible in the setting to me, and I think my fellow players would accept it without too much incredulity, unlike phased array optics or nuclear isomers or quantum immortality. Loyalty therapy would make a useful temptation for a player character currently wandering in the Martian desert with an enemy's alpha fork riding along in place of his Muse. The PC could subvert his enemy--assuming the PC can overcome his motivations of pro-psychosurgical ethics and pro-infomorph rights.

Quote:
I think the others can be done with psychosurgery, with some effort. Maybe Quarantine's modifications show how you could package such psychosurgery mods together.

I'll have to re-read the Psychosurgery rules to see whether the on-off switching common to Egan's insufflated brain modifications can happen in-game. I remember psychosurgery's effects as permanent changes. You could, IIRC, spawn a fork, alter it, allow the altered fork to drive the morph, and then re-merge at a later pre-arranged time. (Supposing the existence of an exoself to make the change, I guess...) I'll have to re-read the various passages of Quarantine to see if I can steal any flavor text from Egan for the subjective experience of merging.

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Sometimes the delete key serves best.

Thu, 2011-10-06 11:29

#10

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Missing Inventions?

Jay Dugger wrote:
Do you judge Ensemble only as loyalty therapy strains suspension of disbelief? It seems plausible in the setting to me, and I think my fellow players would accept it without too much incredulity, unlike phased array optics or nuclear isomers or quantum immortality.

I actually liked the weirdness of Ensemble as probability manipulation, it seems to be like a really supercharged psi sleight in EP with a fairly detailed explanation. But it is entirely separate from the Loyalty mod.

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I think the others can be done with psychosurgery, with some effort. Maybe Quarantine's modifications show how you could package such psychosurgery mods together.
I'll have to re-read the Psychosurgery rules to see whether the on-off switching common to Egan's insufflated brain modifications can happen in-game. I remember psychosurgery's effects as permanent changes.

I think one can expand standard Psychosurgery for this. On-off switching seems eminently doable: it is just posthypnotic suggestions in a sense. I allow a range of more advanced neurohacks in my game that include inserting extra neural connections in the ego file, allowing entirely new circuits to be introduced if they are small enough.

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Mon, 2011-10-10 16:04

#11

Xagroth

Re: Missing Inventions?

Mmm... I'd say that nuclear-related atoms and molecules are heavily watched and pursued by the Planetary Consortium. However, Why do I want a nuke? With a free cornucopia machine and some blueprints I can make anything I want, and right now the most frightening thing you can do in EP is a disassembler & self-replicating nanoswarm... maybe give it a lifespan of 10 minutes before going inert, to try to avoid nasty side effects, but easy to control by any TITAN tech nearby... turning a "cleaner" weapon than a nuke into a nightmare, really making it a second Fall... That only leaves the server sky and the array optics. As for the first, reasons for its banning have been provided, and for the second I'd say that, in EP, it's more easy to grab an asteroid, produce some engines, and burn some liquid hydrogen to generate speed at a precalculated orbit, and let gravity do the rest => Kinetic impact, much cheaper and easy to prepare than a giant laser (also more energy efficient XD). Frankly, I see only three reasons there is no real War in Mars in Eclipse Phase: first, the barsoomians don't have the means and they know it (they are struggling to survive inside morphs with programmed obsolescence, after all...), second the PC is really careful to not press too hard, and keeps everything it can in check. And third, the barsoomians know that they have no chance in hell of turning Mars into a more costly op than the PC wanna pay without ruining the planet for hundreds of years. In my setting, the Barsoomians act a little like Robin Hood, a little like "gentleman-bandits": they intercept whatever they can and mess around trying to increase the costs of the PC as much as they can with as little risk as they are able, but avoiding human casualties (which would result in the creation of another indentured, after all, or in a resleeved human) and indiscriminate acts of damage. They are a guerrilla, facing the enemy wherever they want and choosing their battles with great care, because let's face it: being caught in EP means a lot more than in any other setting you can imagine, thanks to forking, psychosurgery, and resleeving. Wars are about intelligence, and when you can get EVERYTHING in the head of your prisioner, well, lots of changes have to be made, and "paranoid" is the first and most basic of the requisites for an undercovered agent (Moscow spy rules anyone?). Of course, this last paragraph can be used only as a pre-disaster status on Mars, a really unstable situation that a group of players can ignite without even knowing what they did. After this... yeah, Second Fall.

Tue, 2011-10-11 03:55

#12

MirrorField MirrorField's picture

Re: Missing Inventions?

Xagroth wrote:
In my setting, the Barsoomians act a little like Robin Hood, a little like "gentleman-bandits": they intercept whatever they can and mess around trying to increase the costs of the PC as much as they can with as little risk as they are able, but avoiding human casualties (which would result in the creation of another indentured, after all, or in a resleeved human) and indiscriminate acts of damage. They are a guerrilla, facing the enemy wherever they want and choosing their battles with great care, because let's face it: being caught in EP means a lot more than in any other setting you can imagine, thanks to forking, psychosurgery, and resleeving. Wars are about intelligence, and when you can get EVERYTHING in the head of your prisioner, well, lots of changes have to be made, and "paranoid" is the first and most basic of the requisites for an undercovered agent (Moscow spy rules anyone?).

One important rule in intelligence, still valid even in Eclipse Phase: You cannot betray something you do not know. Cell structure, OPSEC, Need To Know... All these will have to be awfully tight. And they will be. Most people will know most of their compatriots only by pseudonym, many bases will have locations known only to select few drivers/pilots (the rest will travel in darkened compartment and possession of unauthorized GPS will be a serious security matter) and the locations will be temporary anyway. Also, I suspect that when Barsoomian goes to an op, he'll leave a most recent backup behind. It would be a matter of pride for the movement and friends to make sure that someone dying in an op gets resleeved, if necessary with entirely new identity and one-year "cooldown period" with cognitive therapy and so on within some hidden base to shift the brainprint profile. There is a reason the movement is constantly hungry for new sleeves. Likewise, Dead Switch would be a nearly universal extra for high-risk personnel. Along willingness to suicide if situation becames hopeless. Slagged cortical stacks can't be psychosurgeried, after all.

Tue, 2011-10-11 08:06

#13

Xagroth

Re: Missing Inventions?

Yeah, I had that into account, but in the end, you need to know something, even if it's only a net adress where to send te result of your investigation/whatever... and with luck and extreme effort, it can be traced to the source. As for the kill switch, I bet it is hard to get precisely for that reason, so I'd expect the barsoomians to have to improvise theirs, even to reach points of sending morphs without cortical stacks. Also, I think the Movement will have lots and lots of synthmorphs (cheap ones, I mean) since they are easier to replace than biomorphs; so an op is carried with synths, while infiltration and such is made using bios. For the cooling down time after a casualty, it's not really necessary. Worst missions get... an alpha fork psychosurgeried' to know only the base knowledge for the mission and the skills, in a one way trip, being that the best way to assure the mission gets carried and no risk of exposure takes place. Of course, I tend to be extremely agressive when it comes to unconventional measures (or inhuman ones...) on paper, but tale into account that the digitalization of the ego is the critical point where Eclipse Phase differs from any other game, and it has tons of consequences.

Tue, 2011-10-11 10:48

#14

MirrorField MirrorField's picture

Re: Missing Inventions?

Xagroth wrote:
Yeah, I had that into account, but in the end, you need to know something, even if it's only a net adress where to send te result of your investigation/whatever... and with luck and extreme effort, it can be traced to the source.

Indeed. But that's no reason to make it simple for the PC goons, is it? Balancing OPSEC and need-to-know has always been a tricky line to navigate. In EP it's even trickier.

Xagroth wrote:
As for the kill switch, I bet it is hard to get precisely for that reason, so I'd expect the barsoomians to have to improvise theirs, even to reach points of sending morphs without cortical stacks. Also, I think the Movement will have lots and lots of synthmorphs (cheap ones, I mean) since they are easier to replace than biomorphs; so an op is carried with synths, while infiltration and such is made using bios.

One would suspect that mere possession of one might be suspicious, but the availability can have awesome variation. From "Not even boss has one" to "Anarchists supporters from Locus got blueprints and nanofac through. Everyone here has one." Also note that a plasma bolt through stack is also a quite effective field-expedient method...

Xagroth wrote:
For the cooling down time after a casualty, it's not really necessary. Worst missions get... an alpha fork psychosurgeried' to know only the base knowledge for the mission and the skills, in a one way trip, being that the best way to assure the mission gets carried and no risk of exposure takes place.

The Intent was and is more in the vein of longer-term safety, namely that if the ego is identified, said person can assume a new identity and not get caught at next brainscan when eg. entering any larger settlement or when some local marshall gets paranoid.

Tue, 2011-10-11 17:50

#15

Jay Dugger Jay Dugger's picture

Re: Missing Inventions?

I reconsidered this post, and I judged it veered off the topic of "Missing Inventions." It discussed known tools and the volatile geopolitics of Mars. I separated the latter into a new thread. The Search box gives plenty of discussion of the former.

—

Sometimes the delete key serves best.

Tue, 2011-10-11 14:13

#16

Xagroth

Re: Missing Inventions?

Kill switch: I was talking about non-PC people (civilians, independents, and of course barsoomians). Leaving aside everything else, I think only a handfull of characters walk around with one, with more people using the one use farcaster implant, if for nothing more, for self-preservation. As a player, I tend to speak ruthlessly about forking, backups and the like, but let's be real, not only EP characters tend to freak out when we talk about that (those sanity losses after resleeving are there for a reason... but of course there are mad people that embrace the massive forking... like ultimates, probably, and the Pax family, I think it was), they tend to dislike to talk about it also. There was an old BOLO novel about a war between some Mk 34 against several Mk 32 tanks controlled by aliens that were quite devoted to backupping and resleeving themselves and subject humans, and the real relevant part was a line of thought about how having your mind digitalized and then implanted into another body was not true inmortality. Another book that mentioned it was a compilation of short stories written by Orson Scott Card, about how a very rich man took a cloning and mind-copy process because his body was quite ruined... and it shows the sufferings of the latest "original" when he realizes now that there is a perfect copy of himself with a healthy body... what about him? As for the ID cooling down, I didn't express myself clearly... with the use of a fork and psychosurgery, plus a new account, mesh inserts, and stuff like that, it's easy to make fake ID's that can be "burned" in the ops, instead of using the real ones. I would go even further, by making several members of the Movement to create and live invented ID's for a time until the IDs are requested for an op, making it easier than breaking inside the databases of the PC and engineer the background (which also tends to be "too perfect" or "too clear"). Of course, the fake ID's should have some sort of base, and most likley are acquired from a criminal organization, but I bet a lot of those ID's "start" in a cold storage unit recently released... Nuclear weapons: transmutating an atom into another is something that I think the cornucopia machines cannot achieve. Also, nuclear weapons tend to filter radiation around... and that's never good, with all those fancy implants you can put in your eyes... As for the exotic radiation being concentrated and all, it comes to my mind some of David Weber's designs about laser missiles (essentially a bunch of rods that will gather and concentrate concrete waves of radiation, projecting them for the instants it takes the nuke's expansive aura that produced that radiation to catch up), and I think those are more about cutting through heavily armored targets than anything else. Right now, I think the only target that would justify the effort would be the orbital elevator... but destroying that would be a really bad idea for the barsoomians. Because of the kinetic bombardment... In sunward you can read somewhere that Earth receives some stones every now and then from the Moon when they detect a high enough concentration of TITAN techin any given area. The Planetary Consortium also is making comets to rain on Mars (so it looks like they are working in the terraformation... it's pure PR, since the only thing that's left in EP in Mars is to keep planting and waiting), so you see, it's a viable way to keep any movement from gathering in large numbers... unless they do it precisely where the PC won't blast them: the closest possible position they can get to the orbital elevator. Because when you face people that only values profit, you don't look for human shields, you look for money shields! ^^ I think it's a little naïve to think that there's no cracked CM in Mars outside of corporate hands (quickstart rules of EP: the players get a cracked CM...). The problem is that CM requires space, energy and matter to work (let's get real: if you can get a CM in corpspace, you can get blueprints), and the bigger it is, the more requires of the first two. As I said, the Movement is a guerrilla one, which means movility, stealth and the capacity to pack and leave as faster as you can. That means that the 40-liters version, mounted on a buggy or similar quick transport, will be the most used. Also, since Mars is so rich on iron, most of the weapons in barsoomian hands will be kinetic weapons. The way I see it, the closest described group to the Movement's tactics could be Dune's freemen, changing their water-gathering bases for iron-gathering ones, with energy plants here and there and some morph-making installations. And yes, while neither the Barsoomian Movement and the Planetary consortium want a war on Mars, life doesn't happen in a vacuum (even in space XD). Leaving accidents aside... what of the Jovian Republic? What of Morningstar? Those two I see ruthless or desperate enough to sacrifice Mars just to keep the PC busy enough to take it down. The jovians because, well, they don't want transhumanism, and only a fool would think they can keep it outside by looking anywhere else, sooner or later the PC will try to get their markets. Morningstar is hard pressed to keep the PC from controlling Venus, and a war in Mars could give them enough time to prepare a strong enough political and economical resistance. So I bet Morningstar provides goods for the Barsoomians, using Scum, while the Jovians are looking and making gently pushes here and there, testing the waters.