Sure, but I also imagine that back then (and every time such a limb is installed on ship) there is an abstracted away 'learning period' where a person learns to use the new limb (every arm is a little different, you can't exactly say what nerve is where and what exactly it controlled, so there should be a 'learning period' the wearer to be able to use his limb). A limb needs fine brain-controlled movement to be very useful, while a synthetic organ could be made much more 'independent'. But this thing now is supposed to be 'plug and play', right? Though I guess pw might be calling in handwavium for this.
Isn't that true for every
Armoury item? Yet everybody seems to somehow know how to fly a shuttle or pilot a MK3 or use a mining exosuit or a computer with people even being able to exchange those suits during a mission. Unless you are proposing that humans somehow naturally know how to fly with MK3s by watching too many spy films. Do you want to have people pass mandatory classes with a multiple choice exam in the end to be able to use a piece of equipment?
Limbs are even simpler than the above. You're not that concerned about feeling or other nerves. You're just concerned about connecting the 3 or 4 (can't remember right now) main nerves that control movement and probably ensuring the nerves responsible for feeling are somewhat right to provide feedback for handling fragile objects. After that, the system can self-adjust and determine the right nerve for each muscle using a machine-learning system, if the doctor can't determine that during surgery with the future-tech medical tools presumably included in the surgery kit. After that, it's just a matter of the body getting used to the limb (and vice versa if the limb has an appropriate self-adjustment system), which is fairly easy, since the body has a very good capacity to adjust to changes that happen to it.
If you wanted things to be completely realistic, then any new piece of equipment would give a penalty and would have a chance of failure when used until the user adjusts to them (probably an hour or less if in stressful conditions), but that would make things needlessly complicated for no real benefit, just for the sake of what someone thinks should be realistic with futuretech. And when we have things like AIs or memory wiping or
magical super-strong white flesh or near-infinite generators or tiny batteries with near-infinite power, I don't think a tool capable of helping a doctor perform surgery and reconnect the right nerves in the field is the thing that would be most unrealistic.
Well yes, I kinda assume that if the surgical tools don't come with suture and such standard, one needs to still buy them. Oh well, we'll see what pw says, but I'll say now I'd probably not consider taking him on my mission until I know what that body has and can do.
If you don't want a good medic on the mission just because there's a very slim chance she might need to buy some extra tools, there's not much I can do about it.
Oh, it's not my plan A either, but I'm trying to prevent us having to go in blind. We'll have to do that differently depending on how many shuttles we have (we should have plenty though, thanks to Hep shipment). Besides, if that scenario happens, and we went down with all our shuttles at once, we might be trapped there with no way out.
I'd say being trapped on a hostile planet beats losing the Sword because we can't go down there to stop whatever danger is there. Because if it is something we could simply shoot from orbit, then the ambush would make little sense, because even if they kill all of us, the Sword could just nuke the installation from orbit. That's why I'm thinking that if it is an ambush from human forces and not some space magic disaster or alien predator, then it is not an ambush for us. It's an ambush for the Sword. And that's why I'm thinking an ambush by human forces is not very likely.
Besides, any ground forces you send won't be able to progress past the gate on the surface for gameplay's sake. Because if we could just remote control sods from orbit, we'd do that every mission. So the colony would still be an unknown to us, we'll just know it's probably safe to land. Unless they did something like bury nukes in the colony and detonate them to trap us in a sinkhole, but again, unlikely due to gameplay.
About sods, true, staying with the shuttles is the only good use I can think of them, besides minesweepers. Assuming they don't go berserk because we awoke some sort of alien artefact and damage or destroy our return shuttle before Steve can zap them (even worse if we lose contact or trigger some sort of anomaly and go to another dimension or something).
About trigger discipline, I'm concerned about their orders. If you remember, Flint once walked straight up to one of them and the sod did nothing until he zapped the sod to death. They also display an astounding lack of concern about other things and self preservation during combat. (Since there have been no explicit mentions of any advanced training program, I'm assuming we're giving them the same old UWM training.) So you'd need orders that take care of that, so that they shoot any bad guy they spot, but not shoot anybody who is not a bad guy and also be careful not to damage anything important while shooting. One could argue the same thing about players, but players don't really need to be given that clear orders beforehand. They screw up naturally due to their own choices and bad luck.
I'm mostly concerned about the fact that they probably have very little will-power. They are not truly human. And humans are known to be somewhat "magical". Their "free range" lives and memories have something in them. Furthermore, sods don't have anything to fight for. They feel constant pleasure as long as they are following orders. So there's nothing they can really draw on for motivation. I don't really know exactly how space magic works, but I doubt the can "scream the loudest" as the AM put it. I mean, consider the fact that 3 trained UWM black ops officers killed themselves because of sharkmist radiation. You'd think sods would had fared better in the same circumstances?
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Topic: Einsteinian Roulette: OOC and NEW PLAYER INFO (Read 2486912 times)