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[Parisbre56]

@Council: Have you ever considered using something like quicktopic or Google groups? Might make keeping track of what has been said easier, since it's like a thread. And it doesn't have a limit to how many you can send, unlike PMs. Only problem is that you can't quote as easily.

[Devastator]

Since you only need one limb vat for an entire party, shouldn't it cost more like.. 8 tokens?  4 is cheap enough for each person to have a vat.

[Egan_BW]

Since you only need one limb vat for an entire party, shouldn't it cost more like.. 8 tokens?  4 is cheap enough for each person to have a vat.

As far as I know, it cost 10 and always has.

[Parisbre56]

Since you only need one limb vat for an entire party, shouldn't it cost more like.. 8 tokens?  4 is cheap enough for each person to have a vat.

A limb vat can only produce a single type of limb. And it can't be reprogrammed. So you need multiple if you want more than infinite arms.

Then again, I don't see why they can't make a vat that creates synthetic human bodies out of sharkmist and simply use those to replace human/robot bodies or their parts when necessary. I don't really understand how sharkmist limbs can work on both robots and humans, but if they do work, then shouldn't entire bodies made of them work on both robots and humans? Worst case scenario, you just replace all robobodies with sharkmist bodies.

[Nikitian]

On infinite limbs: Yes, but limbs can be designed with reasonable interchangeability. Hands are good as is, but with a little extra design, they could turn into passably good feet - and arms/legs even have the same number of joints, they just appear to bend in the opposite directions (knees bend forward, elbows bend backward) so they would need slightly different types of installation - or those joints could simply be made to bend both ways. Freaky, but works (and, worst comes to worst, can always be programmed not to bend in a wrong way to spare the human mind).

What I don't like about this idea is that, apparently, if you lose a forearm on a mission, and the team leader/local medic decides to replace it with prosthetics, you'll get whole rest of the arm cut off to fit the 'arm' prosthetic. Maybe that could be solved, but I don't know; I'd like to save every inch of my flesh if I could.


On Kugelblitz: That looks good, but don't you want to tinker with it a bit more? For example (and this I had been thinking a lot previously, too bad I don't do deathtubes), one could try lining gauss barrel (or even railgun, normally far too easy to damage with wear) with frictionless material - we have several lately. What kind is the generator? Specify that you are using a cheap generator from RC's 'Advanced Generators' project. Saying that you use the new fuels is self-obvious, but still specify so - oh, and you might decide to use Sean's new plasma-thrusters (they appear to be a bit slower, but has larger effective range and even cheaper, IIRC, which might be just what you want).

Specify how and where you cut down on the resource cost and use newer, advanced tech, or it will likely be ignored and forgotten. Bringing the price down is an engineering problem, so approach it as such; don't trust the Council to be all nice and good and give you the low price you deserve. Convince them through the force of reasoning.

And finally, before anything else, run this by Piecewise to get a rough resource cost estimate. Whatever they might say, I wouldn't trust them to decide a resource cost - they are in the job of balancing, and balancing comes after the resource cost; knowing them, I wouldn't put it past them to slap a HGC price on it and call a day. A freakin' outdated, obsolete-tech, inefficient-design HGC - simply because it fills a similar role, and as such has to have a similar price.

[tryrar]

huh, I'll have to look through that post, but weren't the plasma thrusters MORE expensive? Otherwise I would have specified them....

[Xantalos]

With me at least IIRC I can save limbs in myself so people can get them reattached later if they really want. Maybe we should develop a portable stasis preserver thingy for body parts/brains/etc?

[tryrar]

huh, I'll have to look through that post, but weren't the plasma thrusters MORE expensive? Otherwise I would have specified them....

Looking through the hep thread, PW and sean didn't actually specify if plasma engines were more expensive, just bigger and less overall thrust(but a longer burn time and more fuel for a given mass, plus don't explode when hit). So I guess unless the Council says they do get more expensive, I'll use plasma thruster for a range boost.

[Kriellya]

What I don't like about this idea is that, apparently, if you lose a forearm on a mission, and the team leader/local medic decides to replace it with prosthetics, you'll get whole rest of the arm cut off to fit the 'arm' prosthetic. Maybe that could be solved, but I don't know; I'd like to save every inch of my flesh if I could.

This is pure practicality. (I only chime in here because I chatted with PW on exactly this issue already, and this was the conclusion I came to with him )

In the field, we are not a hospital. We do not have the luxury of infinite time or infinite resources. We can't carry around the dozens of slight variations on the prosthetic that would be required to deal with *exactly* what has to be removed, nor do we have the time to care. Something has removed part of a limb. We need that soldier to have a working limb as soon as possible, dealing with whatever injured him in the first place. And that means taking a hack-saw to most of the limb, so that we can replace it with a ready-to-go prosthetic limb. And from our perspective as field medics, our prosthetic is as good as makes no difference to the flesh we removed. The patient may see it differently, but he needs to survive to care, and we do as well.

Now, kind of incidentally, I'd like to design a battlesuit that could deal with this with more finesse (no, not the ridiculous limb suit. Something more like a self-contained surgery suite ), but in the absence of that, quick-and-dirty is going to be the order of the day.

[Nikitian]

Yeah, I understand that very well. And that's exactly why I think we should not dabble into "field surgery reattaching limbs" territory.
But that's me and my character the Purist-sympathiser 

Also, that's why I am looking forward to the day when limbs can be regrown instead of replaced - at the very least, it should already be more or less possible with severed-but-not-destroyed limbs; next it comes to being able to shape fleshknitter.

Oh well. You have your lane of research to work with, I have mine. Sharkmist vats are approved for armory inclusion. There, Kri convinced me. 

[Parisbre56]

Can't you stick half a sharkmist limb on half an arm and have it eat the rest of the arm? It would help save resources or time. Maybe. Or at least it would be fun to watch.

[Kriellya]

Yeah, my character has a slightly different idea of purist. Robotic components are fine, Skylar understands those. Now, those bone fragments that regrow limbs? Those are right out XD

(He also has pretty minimal interest in the Sharkmist vat at the moment, possibly for similar reasons. I didn't even know why you brought it up, it was just the result of a conversation I had with PW about buying and modifying perfectly normal robo-limbs )

[Unholy_Pariah]

Small discs of salubrious border could very likely be used to re-attach limbs in the field.

Anyone wanna slide me a single token for a whole tusk to study? Doesnt need to be your token specifically.

[Parisbre56]

Why don't you ask for a battlesuit carrying one of the flesh regrowth vats they use in the infirmary? It won't be as good for robots or as easy to use as the DoctorBody, but it will allow you to regrow, reattach and heal any sort of flesh, given time and a skilled (+4 probably) medic. You could even use it to revive people. For smaller injuries you just use flesh knitter.

Alternatively, make a portable tool with a biological 3d printer. It immobilises the injured body part (and optionally surrounds it with a air tight seal). It then proceeds to quickly print a framework (like scaffolding) where the missing organ or limb needs to go. Finally, it pumps it full of flesh knitter, which, with the 3d printed scaffold providing a framework, should be able to build the organs in their proper shape rather than a lump of cells. (If needed, add a way to dissolve the scaffold into something harmless when done). This idea is much smaller, cheaper, easier to use and quicker than the regrowth vat, but it probably cannot be used to fix severe injuries or revive people. And again it has the problem that it's useless for robots, but it might be cheap enough, portable enough (you don't need an exoskeleton to carry limbs and various organs or the vat that makes them) and versatile enough (you can replace everything, from eyes to guts) to justify buying it anyway.

[tryrar]

This just in!


standard Kugelblitz round shreds mk. I-III(naturally), doesn't destroy synthflesh but definitely hurts them, hurts milnoplate(the plate survives but anything not covered by the plate is in trouble), and Battlesuits tend to laugh it off. Standard HE is about equivilant to a 100lb bomb. The thunderhead, being a double-sized warhead, generally does twice as good(PW said if you catch synthflesh flat, he'd be very unhappy). Also, he doesn't think plasma thrusters would work or help really, so I'm deleting that part.

Oh, and one more thing. I defined how long the missile is: about a bit longer than two twin d-cell flashlights stuck together(or 60cm for reference.) with 1/3 of that warhead. That makes the Thunderheads(which are 33% longer) 80cm long.