/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

Venus is creepy Edition

OFFICIAL BOOKS
>Eclipse Phase PDFs
robboyle.wordpress.com/eclipse-phase-pdfs
>Zone Stalkers
mediafire.com/view/d0hpgo776xpx50p/Eclipse_Phase_Zone_Stalkers.pdf
>Morph Recognition Guide
mediafire.com/download/j4bjbba89kw8v0y/Eclipse_Phase_Morph_Recognition_Guide_(6098716).pdf
>Million Year Echo
mediafire.com/view/f53f1c5yq777tpk/Million_Year_Echo.pdf
>Firewall (Updated):
mediafire.com/view/9jg6q9d9kqa59qu/Eclipse_Phase_Firewall_(7029562).pdf
>Transhumanity's FATE (FATE Conversion)
mediafire.com/download/ae113ujgd3hggpl/Transhumanitys_FATE.pdf

PLAY AIDS:
>10 things you should know about Eclipse Phase
docs.google.com/document/d/1Qnrh0w7H0Jl2_CSsySRxcs4ugw27xsBIk5MYwXq2nDQ/edit
>Advice for new players and GMs
pastebin.com/e0EErN6X
>Online character creator
eclipsephase.next-loop.com/Creator/version4/index.php
>Eclipse Phase hacking cheet sheet
mediafire.com/view/?axe1vs35muk4juh
>Eclipse Phase xls Character sheet
sites.google.com/site/eclipsephases/home/cabinet
>Package Character Creator
firewallagency.wordpress.com/

COMMUNITY CONTENT:
>3 new adventures for your use in convenient PDF form
awdaberton.wordpress.com/about/
>Ander's Sandberg's Eclipse Phase fanmade content, including several modules
aleph.se/EclipsePhase/
>Farcast: An Eclipse Phase yearblog full of items, locations, NPCs, and plot hooks
mediafire.com/download/dhqd1m83xc1wmpj/Farcast_Yearblog_2013.pdf
>The Ultimate's Guide to Combat
eclipsephase.com/sites/default/files/UltimatesGuideToCombat11a.pdf

/EPG/ HOMEBREW CONTENT
docs.google.com/document/d/19Gy02gp6-WPQ3SoN_24kLPTUu5EjFO8qh_9pjJSVrrY/edit

Previous Thread: What's the deal with Venus anyway?

Other urls found in this thread:

extremetech.com/extreme/186537-biologists-discover-electric-bacteria-that-eat-pure-electrons-rather-than-sugar-redefining-the-tenacity-of-life
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Well that puts a damper on my plan. I'm running a game for players new to the game and I wanted to have a simple premise: they're hypercorp asteroid miners, on a return leg to their mining station in the asteroid belt with their haul of ores. They get a distress call from a disabled mining ship that belongs to the same hypercorp.

They stop, get on the ship, find no survivors but finds creepy organic growths on certain parts of the ship (ie foreshadowing). They retrieve the cortical stacks of the ship crew to be resleeved back on the mining station. On returning to the station they update their own backups...

And cue to a week and a half later, when these backups wake up and the station's gone to shit, in the process of being turned into an exsurgent hive from the cortical stacks the PCs brought back.

Just a rough outline right now, might throw in other events/things to do/space pirates.

It's where all the TITANs are, o'course.

Is there Baneposting in the future?

Well, while the Asteroid Belt is probably well documented and tracked, and not as densely populated as fiction would have you believe, it's still a region that's fairly densely populated. A ship would probably want some maneuvering room should any sudden course corrections need to be made, or have plenty of fuel if you need to plot a slightly lengthier course.

Combine with the fact that it's a friendly ship from the same corp, probably headed back to the same place, it's entirely possible it might be relatively close, close enough to run an SLOTV or EVA Sled over.

Now, this has other complications. Full Stop in space is hard and uses a lot of resources, both to stop and get started again. This means you'd either have to match speed, or, much more interesting and prone to have the PCs make bad horror movie decisions, they have a short window in which to examine the ship before they HAVE to leave in order to make their own rendezvous back to their ore hauler.

that got me thinking of a post-post humanity solar system. I wonder what the setting would be like one hundred years later if\when mankind fails to survive or die out. Leaving a solar system warping from the AIs warping planets.

Why not have them receive the call shortly before their departure? No need to waste reaction mass for a grand decceleration, just plot a little detour. which of course would still cost some additional fuel, but my guess is that possibly securing an entire ship is worth that. They could even get the order from the station to do so if they are the only ship near enough.

>or have plenty of fuel if you need to plot a slightly lengthier course.
Propellant requirements are not closely correlated to travel distance. Orbital inclination and ascending node differences are likely to be the biggest determining factor in delta-v requirements within the belt.

Probably should have said "a more complex course". In space you can travel very short distances but still spend a lot of fuel if you're doing a lot of hard maneuvering.

You can transfer between any two asteroids with just two maneuvers

In the same family?

Any two asteroids, in principle. In practice minor course corrections will be necessary due to finite precision in the initial maneuver.

Latest X-Risks preview in case people missed it

As much of an X-threat as any other AGI.

This comment has the right of it I think:
Just have them get news of the distress call from their company shortly after leaving. That's enough time that a detour is cheap in fuel, and it makes it so they get less prep than getting to pack from the start. That detour is probably a low relative velocity pass, so time is limited to move around on the ship.

I'd hope that hundreds of years from now, they'd have newer movies to meme about. So there probably is, but it has nothing to do with the nolan batman films.

Y'know, this line of discussion has me thinking about some things.

We've talked about some ships before, but have we ever discussed ideas and layouts for the Bulk Carrier before?

Personally I reckon they'd be like a modern cargo carrier ship, only even more skeletal and modular. Just rack cargo containers in the front end, primary propulsion and command in the back, which can be modified to fit the appropriate fuel and crew needs. The skeleton would probably have some maintenance tubes so drones or crew men can scuttle around and poke things.

Probably about as aerodynamic as a brick, so they wouldn't see use in an atmosphere, which probably helps making their designs simple and easy to operate in micrograv.

My guess would be something like a string ship. Propulsion module on the front, trailing containers on tensile cable, and a crew module hanging at the very end, behind a good x ray shield. A stringship design saves a fair amount of weight, as CNT or similar strings are basically weightless compared to the propulsion module (probably fusion) and the cargo.

I'd imagine that a lot of EP bulk carriers are carrying huge amounts of raw materials, so saving ship weight helps a lot.

I agree that drones would be really common on board, and the crew would probably be even smaller than a modern cargo ship.

Bulk frieghters in Traveller have a similar design using standardised cargo containers. Small craft, lighters or shuttles, service the larger vessels ferrying the containers to the surfaceor to orbital staitions.
Seems efficient

Something like the ISV venture star or a Project Valkyrie space craft.

Always imagined them as spindly things with loads of containers attached. Really small cabins for crew and buttloads of reaction mass. Then again, there might be lots of variant designs around.

God damn the Fate book has some dubious rules.

How do you decelerate? Sounds like the crew hab, or more likely the shield, would need decent sized retrorockets.

Probably have a rear engine structure and a forward truss structure, then just strap everything down to the truss.

This creates all sorts of problems with your engines being pointed at stuff.

You turn it around and burn, just like anything else. It's the turning that's tricky.

That's fairly manageable, so long as your cargo is x-ray tolerant.

Spin the whole thing around when you're not burning the engines.

Sounds easier with retrorockets.

>That's fairly manageable, so long as your cargo is x-ray tolerant.

And also doesn't mind being exposed to plasmas significantly hotter than the sun. You know what? Scratch the manageable bit.

So, we talked about general structure. What do you think about the crew compliment and crew sections are like?

How do you think cargo haulers are crewed? I know everyone wants to just be Alien, but that's a lot of crew for humble space truckers. And the Nostromo was very roomy too.

Personally, I think that, like, pure hypercorp transports which are wholly owned by companies like ComEx who ship generic "stuff" in bulk, these are probably as cost efficient as possible, smallest number of indentures and AIs needed to operate the ship with as little impact as possible, but I would reckon smaller companies and contractors probably can handle a few physically instanced crew (y'know, because hands and no need to worry about if infomorphs can run nicely), and if an "indefinite" life support maker for a single person can fit in a hard suit this could have pressurized sections. Not accounting for Bulk Carriers converted to have passenger modules too.

But how much crew and how much crew space do you think would be common? Is it cost effective to have an Alien-level crew and crew section?

You either get two, maybe three Hybernoids to push buttons or you just use an infomorph crew. Why pay for food, water, and life support when you can just slap a server in there and use the saved space for more cargo?

No crew. There would be nothing for them to do. Bolt a few EVA-appropriate synths to the hull and farcast some specialists in if something goes wrong.

> farcast some specialists in if something goes wrong.

Isn't a proper farcasting rig like, really weighty? And normally need somebody to run them at the other end?

For synthmorphs all you need is a comms array, which the spacecraft needs to have anyway.

You can put the engines on booms, or point them slightly outwards if the small reduction in efficiency is worth it. Plasmas cool super quickly so distance shielding is pretty easy to use. Tractor/stringship designs are something which has been around for a while as a weight saving measure.

If you want neutrino comms those are pretty big, but that means you'd need a pickup truck to move them around. That's peanuts for a space ship. You can also use radio or laser link if you're at close range or have good sight lines.

For bulk haulers moving on common routes leaving them uncrewed even as automated ALI vessels seems reasonable. There's just not much to run into in space.

>For bulk haulers moving on common routes leaving them uncrewed even as automated ALI vessels seems reasonable.
Zbryny or however you spell that vowelless abortion of a company beat you to the idea, user.

Actually, mentioning Zbryny and "Zombieland", isn't hugely massive bulk transports crewed by nothing but ALI kind of a security risk in the post-Fall world? Like, people don't often use Pods crewed by ALI because of mass AI subversion during the Fall.

>You can put the engines on booms, or point them slightly outwards if the small reduction in efficiency is worth it

Sure, you can do those things, but all of that adds mass or reduces delta-v. Also, now you need two small engines instead of one big one, which reduces efficiency and creates more potential points of failure.

>Plasmas cool super quickly so distance shielding is pretty easy to use.

Still have to avoid burning the cable, which is non-trivial.

> You can also use radio or laser link if you ... have good sight lines.

You have good sight lines.

>The Titanian Commonwealth is modeled after Finland instead of Sweden

That's what happens when you try to go from heavy crunch to low crunch.

You could always stick a solitary Neo-Octopus infomorph on with all the tentacle porn he could possibly need and he'd be content to chill and jam bots when needed.

The Finns aren't Nordic, though.

There's only one thing about Titan I want to discuss

Neither are baby TITANs and talking animals, but the Titanians don't seem to mind them.

True, the sight line caveat only really really applies to orbiting transmitters which get occluded by planets from time to time, and that's easy to relay around.

EP space ships don't really have points of failure during normal operations, so the extra engine is only a potential efficiency loss.

Those losses are ok if the mass savings from using tensile strength rather than compression strength outway the less efficient engine design, which definitely can.

Settling this depends on the minutia of EP materials science, which is pretty hard to judge. CNT tethers are super light, but maybe there's some almost as good compressive strength supermaterial available.

Those are small fish. Huldra are exsurgents. They obviously use TITAN tech and just look at the voting records of anyone who's sleeved in one. They need to be exterminated.

You have to deal with precision issues, though, which get worse with distance.

>X morph or technology is obviously TITAN tech

When will this meme die.

Alternatively, when will all the TITANs come back and kill everyone?

It dies when they start following the laws of thermodynamics.

>When will this meme die.
It's not a meme, it's established in the books that lots of post-Fall tech is knocked off from TITAN leftovers.

>when will all the TITANs come back and kill everyone?
They already have. The world described in the corebook is one of their many simspaces.

I doubt it'll ever really die, like REMOVE SURYA.

You know you're still wrong about this, right? Long Term Life Support requires steady intake of Carbon and Water and regular intake of chemical supplements to a maximum length of 1 year.

All this wanking about "perpetual motion" is STILL stupid because it's not perpetual.

IIRC the problem with LTLS is where all the energy for the recycling comes from, unless the chemical packs are really just elemental oxygen or something.

I haven't checked it out yet. What specifically?

For reference I'm this user.

>For bulk haulers moving on common routes leaving them uncrewed even as automated ALI vessels seems reasonable. There's just not much to run into in space.

>No crew. There would be nothing for them to do. Bolt a few EVA-appropriate synths to the hull and farcast some specialists in if something goes wrong.

>You either get two, maybe three Hybernoids to push buttons or you just use an infomorph crew. Why pay for food, water, and life support when you can just slap a server in there and use the saved space for more cargo?

Yeah, but...I kind of really, really don't want to alienate my players, none of whom know anything about the setting. I don't want their first exposure to the setting be "well you're basically just inside a server/robots on a ship since it's more efficient to not have any biologicals onboard. TRANSHUMAN FUUUUTURE".

Also, what about this? I'm sure automated transports are a thing, but isn't that risky, especially in the crowded main belt where piracy and violence erupting over asteroid claims can be a thing? No crew means that ship's basically at the mercy of the first pirate that knows their way around electronics.

Who's gonna take care of stuff when the maintenance drones break down, or there's a problem with the ship that automation can't handle? I GUESS you can install an expensive egocasting facility inside the ship, but if the issue or problem is bad enough where time's a luxury, I really don't think that's efficient.

Well, when talking about "Hulders are TITANs", usually people shout about LTLS being "perpetual motion" and the like.

Personally, I think it's ambiguously written enough to not need to worry about, it never specifies the nature or amount of the chemical reserves or specialized bacteria it integrates, and lots of power is just assumed in EP. Like, a Hard Suit can fit a maker which can indefinitely supply air/food/water, and you can get a laser gun installed in your hand and powered by a nuclear battery pack pretty cheap. The life support implant has an actual hard cap on how long it runs before it can no longer recycle with is usually more detailed thinking than some implants or tech has.

It's actually really good but Morphs cost Refresh despite having zero mechanical impact beyond determining Durability.

As the guy you quoted about automation problems, honestly, like I know everyone wants to go "oh, we can just streamline this shit with AIs and drones", but at the same time the system doesn't purely reflect that.

Systems and economies based on AI and drone management almost always have transhumans available to coordinate and do the "hands on" work handy at all times too. Running infomorphs properly is expensive, and while fine to have an ALI run the basic ship functions given stuff like the fact that makers and other life support gear can be pretty efficient means that like, if you're hauling really huge masses around compensating for the crew and their gear is probably not a huge deal. Yeah, sure, a newer model might replace all that with some efficiently running servers but that's still expensive to do properly. Just cramming infomorphs into random devices really hurts their effectiveness.

>expensive egocasting facility inside the ship, but if the issue or problem is bad enough where time's a luxury, I really don't think that's efficient.

Also unless you're rolling like a beast, almost everyone will have some physical and mental side effects to a resleeve immediately after, which lasts hours.

I really dislike some of the design decisions. 'Xeno Contact' and 'X Risks' in particular seem like a poor kludge solution to reconciling massive lists of knowledge skills with the FATE approach.

...

Really? I found the Skills list quite elegant. Fate thrives on simplicity, and too many more past what made it into the book would've flown in the face of the Fate design aesthetic.

Well, I mean, that's kind of the fundamental dichotomy here. FATE thrives on a style and approach which gets more and more streamlined each iteration and makes a specific tone of game (which in this case I've heard described as "If it was Eclipse Phase The Movie"), whereas the original style and direction and tone of the EP Core is not that. It's very much about modability, specialization and broadness. It has a lot of elements to the setting and you can use any number of them to solve problems which can occur in your game of "Transhuman Conspiracy and Horror". You're supposed to string together modifiers, and be specific about if you have a PhD in Geophysics or Astrophysics and create a plan to get your perfect storm of bonuses for that all-important digital intrusion or rifle shot.

Generally I think knowledge skills in games like FATE should work like they do in Gumshoe. You pick a few fields your character knows about and, when push comes to shove, you just know them, you don't have to buy and roll them like normal skills.

Also I think X Risks and Xeno Contact should be treated like the Cthulhu Mythos skill, you might start with points in it, but you shouldn't be able to just buy as much as you want during character generation.

But Fate isn't Gumshoe, and what you're proposing would involve bolting a whole new subsystem onto the game. The last thing a Fate game needs is more complexity.

>The last thing a Fate game needs is more complexity.

Then knowledge skills should be removed entirely. Cutting all of them out except one or two is lopsided and absurd.

Can someone sell me on Gatecrashing?

EP is a game about politics and technology and a gatecrashing game seems to abandon both.

Well, really EP is a game of Transhuman Conspiracy and Horror. You'll find plenty of both beyond the gates - just check out the Gatecrashing book.

But specifically

>politics

Not only is there a sociopolitical element to the political power of controlling a gate, but there's a lot of opportunity for politics and interesting social issues to come up.

> technology

Gatecrashing actually offers a twofer here. On the one hand, there are a lot of diverse, complex and straight up dangerous environments which can occur and can be overcome with technological solutions. And then there's the potential of alien species and alien technological artifacts which can be studied out there too.

Broadly, Gatecrashing is a way to touch on a lot of themes, potential settings and elements you can't necessarily access in the Solar System itself, while still playing to EPs core ideas.

>EP space ships don't really have points of failure during normal operations, so the extra engine is only a potential efficiency loss.

What?
Do you think thusting off-axis isn't a problem?

Yes, this issue is not addressed in the books. It would be quite conceivable to run them on nuclear batteries though.

extremetech.com/extreme/186537-biologists-discover-electric-bacteria-that-eat-pure-electrons-rather-than-sugar-redefining-the-tenacity-of-life
(explanation in article is terrible, but the bacteria are real)

>Also, what about this? I'm sure automated transports are a thing, but isn't that risky, especially in the crowded main belt where piracy and violence erupting over asteroid claims can be a thing?

What is a crew going to do about that which couldn't be done by automated security systems which are far less likely to surrender?

>No crew means that ship's basically at the mercy of the first pirate that knows their way around electronics.

Step 1: shoot pirates before they get close enough to access your maintenance panels
Step 2: profit

Alternatively, just send mercenary kill teams after pirates who hit your haulers as a deterrent to future pirates.

>I GUESS you can install an expensive egocasting facility inside the ship
Literally just need a comm array, which you want to have anyway

>but if the issue or problem is bad enough where time's a luxury
There's no life support failing and the spacecraft is floating through space without doing anything anyway. It can wait a few hours. Frankly I'm not even sure what could go wrong until you start your deceleration burn.

Disgusting

>Also unless you're rolling like a beast, almost everyone will have some physical and mental side effects to a resleeve immediately after, which lasts hours.

That's why the corp retains some specialists who are extremely at home in the morphs they use. Also paying a guy to sit for a few hours while lack wears off is way cheaper than paying a guy to sit there for the whole trip and probably not do anything anyway.

Retrorockets and the fuel lines to go to them cost mass. More mass means more fuel. More fuel means *more* fuel. This quickly becomes uneconomical, especially for applications like bulkfreighters where you're trying to get paid. Using a tiny puff of RCS reaction mass and waiting a few days for the ship to turn around while it's coasting between its Hohmann burns is infinitely cheaper.

For military ships, the reduction in maneuver time would probably be worth it though.

>What is a crew going to do about that which couldn't be done by automated security systems which are far less likely to surrender?

Narrow programming, vulnerable to infosec attacks and manipulation are pretty fucking big.

>shoot pirates before they get close enough to access your maintenance panels

But you're not physically present, so...with what? The infomorph who can't do jackshit with the drones the minute the pirates hack into/jam Mesh communications?

Calling mercenaries achieves nothing when your ore's already been stolen. Or just station the damn mercs on the ship.

>Literally just need a comm array, which you want to have anyway

You need a quantum farcasters to egocast. Which are much more difficult and time-consuming to set up than a comm array.

>There's no life support failing and the spacecraft is floating through space without doing anything anyway. It can wait a few hours.

That implies that a) the technical problem involves life support, and b) it's only a few hours away from its destination. If something bad happens in the middle of the trip, and that problem can't be solved by automated AIs or robots, then it's fucked.

> Frankly I'm not even sure what could go wrong until you start your deceleration burn.

Dunno, I've never been on or seen a spaceship as complex in any sci-fi setting. I'd think that even with Eclipse Phase's extremely generous granting of capabilities to nanotechnology and materials science, technical problems can and do frequently pop up that needs direct human oversight.

I'm sure that completely automated ships are around, but I really don't think that they're the norm, especially after the Fall and especially with the fact that fabricating ships is expensive, no matter how much magical nanofabrication you apply to it. If you really want to leave the security of your expensive as fuck ship to vulnerable ALI and automated maintenance systems without direct human supervision, go right ahead.

>Guise hacking into a spacecraft is just as easy as hacking into a poorly secured hab system.

Quantum cryptography exists.

>Calling mercenaries achieves nothing when your ore's already been stolen. Or just station the damn mercs on the ship.

False. Once the mercenaries are done torturing the pirates to death a few times people think twice about knocking over one of your haulers. Organized crime organizations operate this way and it's very lucrative for them.

You can afford to lose a shipment.

>You need a quantum farcasters to egocast.
False, but you're going to want that anyway for secure communication.

>That implies that a) the technical problem involves life support, and b) it's only a few hours away from its destination. If something bad happens in the middle of the trip, and that problem can't be solved by automated AIs or robots, then it's fucked.
No, it implies that technical problems that aren't life support related can wait long enough for someone to egocast to your spacecraft.

>If you really want to leave the security of your expensive as fuck ship to vulnerable ALI and automated maintenance systems without direct human supervision, go right ahead.

You know what ALIs don't do though? Accept bribes from pirates.

Now it seems like we're overinflating things. These commonly used Bulk Transports carrying slow-boat low priority goods are now loaded with cutting edge quantum computers, ECCM suites, full blown anti-ship weapons and an expensive and bulky farcasting equipment, spare unused morphs, and backed with expensive "kill team" insurance to wage space war on people who still are brave enough to try and fuck with you.

Or, since the Bulk Carrier is described as a refitted Standard Transport template, just with cargo holders instead of the external habitation rings, you can probably just scale back the life support components to keep a handful of space truckers alive in hibernoids (not like those were made for any reason) and give them some space guns and hands to use physical access keys and tell anybody who tries to freeboot you to fuck off

Honestly, like, a Bulk Carrier has to carry a lot of shit. Practically, Pirates shouldn't have access to the Delta-V to move around all that cargo. If they did I feel like they would be in some other business. So you either have to go through a whole lot of trouble to only take a little cargo, or have a way to capture a ship and haul it off course somewhere where you and your pirate friends can start unloading it before the ship or cargo's owners can send out a team to recover it.

It seems much more profitable to try and accost small, high-value cargo or hit up passenger ships to have people trying to travel physically and have them payout.

Or to cruise up next to a bulk carrier and be like "transmit your manifest and then give us the container we name, or we'll fire one of the HEAP missiles bolted to our fuselage into your drive section".

This. The best thing, as a pirate, you can do with a bulk carrier is probably hold it for ransom.

>48 DUR
>66 DR
>12 INT
>16 fuckin' SOM
>and 10 COO... but don't tell anyone you leveled that up, you fucking faggot

>These commonly used Bulk Transports carrying slow-boat low priority goods are now loaded with cutting edge quantum computers
Not how quantum cryptography works

>ECCM suites
Never said that

>full blown anti-ship weapons
Simple anti-personnel systems

>and an expensive and bulky farcasting equipment
The comms array that you have anyway because farcasting isn't special

>spare unused morphs
Way cheaper than crew

>and backed with expensive "kill team" insurance to wage space war on people who still are brave enough to try and fuck with you.
Crew won't stop you from wanting that

>Or, since the Bulk Carrier is described as a refitted Standard Transport template, just with cargo holders instead of the external habitation rings, you can probably just scale back the life support components to keep a handful of space truckers alive in hibernoids (not like those were made for any reason) and give them some space guns and hands to use physical access keys and tell anybody who tries to freeboot you to fuck off

Physical access keys are less secure than quantum encryption, the guns cost essentially the same amount either way, the employees cost money and are a big security hole, the life support costs money and is heavy

Do you just not know how pirates work? They generally take the whole ship.

Personally, I'm with here: dealing with Pirates should be as simple as using ALI systems, automated miners (if extraction is necessary), a closed network and self-destruct measures if your ship gets taken.

I promise that after the first ship blows, you'll never have a hijacker again. Even pirates don't want to waste resources.

>Even pirates don't want to waste resources.

Except you, wasting valuable resources to blow up your huge ships full of cargo.

10 is leveled up?

Literally all you would need there for egocasting securely to a rig would be a receiver with one-time pad decryption connected to a synth or small server.

Then they'd just hijack it with expendable clankers and collect the scrap when you blow it up.

Just saying, Dazzlers are [Moderate], and Lens Crazers are [High]

Post questionnaires

>Any amount of breakage is unacceptable
Are you 15?

No, but I don't think having multiple smaller engines is a problem. This isn't like building an N1 in the 1960s, rocket engines don't just break at the top of a hat.

That actually sounds like an interesting lead in for a one shot game. A repair crew egocasted into an automated bulk hauler which has gone dead. There's a lot of directions you could take that, from cargo containing active TITAN weapons, or just simply pirates.

If pirates are jumping a ship mid journey, there's no amount of info security which is going to keep them out. They've got the time to physically replace every computer.

Blowing up your ships when they get taken by pirates is a policy which quickly has other shipping hypercorps buying off suicide forked pirates to ruin you.

Destroying an entire very large, presumably very expensive ship and all of it's probably large mass of cargo isn't "any breakage", it's like, all the breakage.

You're asking terrorists with suicide forks to just crash your business, like said. You gain nothing from such an action besides smug satisfaction.

And the fact that pirates can probably squat unclaimed asteroids and make Cases for days will take that last part away.

>No, but I don't think having multiple smaller engines is a problem. This isn't like building an N1 in the 1960s, rocket engines don't just break at the top of a hat.
If you have two engines on pylons and one of them breaks, you're fucked.

>If pirates are jumping a ship mid journey, there's no amount of info security which is going to keep them out. They've got the time to physically replace every computer.

Not if you shoot them when they board. That said, the proposed physical key system is just as vulnerable to this.

>Blowing up your ships when they get taken by pirates is a policy which quickly has other shipping hypercorps buying off suicide forked pirates to ruin you.

I'll agree that it shouldn't be the first layer of defense, but why would this ruin you more than just stealing the stuff in the first place?

>Destroying an entire very large, presumably very expensive ship and all of it's probably large mass of cargo isn't "any breakage", it's like, all the breakage.
First off, I proposed the mercenary kill team, particularly since they might be able to recover it after they finish torturing the pirates to death repeatedly.

Second, big shipping companies actually do lose ships from time to time. This is what insurance is for.

Third, a crew will not prevent this loss.

Theoretically stolen items can be recovered. You pop the fusion drive powering a bulk carrier and have it flash out and local pirates and scavs will have picked any scraps clean before you can get any back. It is like, all loss.

>First off

Then why are you poking at my response about how "nobody wants to waste resources" except the guy blowing up ships to keep pirates from having them?

Surely you can see the irony in this.

>Second, big shipping companies actually do lose ships from time to time. This is what insurance is for.

I'm not an expert in insurance, but I'm pretty sure if you're blowing up your own ships and this is part of your official policy, the insurance company isn't going to want to cover you. That or they're gonna charge you an arm and leg because they know for sure your shit is going to get rendered irrecoverable.

>Third, a crew will not prevent this loss.

You can't lens craze a man in a vacsuit.

>Then why are you poking at my response about how "nobody wants to waste resources" except the guy blowing up ships to keep pirates from having them?

Because even if it is too heavy handed it would hurt the pirates way more than the shipping company and deters more attempts at piracy.

>I'm not an expert in insurance, but I'm pretty sure if you're blowing up your own ships and this is part of your official policy, the insurance company isn't going to want to cover you. That or they're gonna charge you an arm and leg because they know for sure your shit is going to get rendered irrecoverable.
If it's so recoverable then just let the pirates fucking have it and then recover it. Still no reason for a crew.

>You can't lens craze a man in a vacsuit.
Do you not realize that human eyes contain lenses?

Let's not even get into how hab assault is like, the shittiest thing to try and do, especially when the stakes are "get paid" vs "I get to live".

Plus the political field day all your inevitable enemies will have with, y'know, your complete lack of due process or ignorance of "basic human rights". Throw in a memejob about war crimes on some innocent "settlers" just minding their own business... It's just a huge hassle for what, you mafia some guys a couple times thinking that will actually deter them?

It has to be cheaper just to buy some fucking point defense weapons and be like "if you fly too close we'll fuck your shit". Fusion drives have power to spare.

>Do you not realize that human eyes contain lenses?

But dazzler/crazer/spotter only are noted to detect and work on camera lenses.

>Because even if it is too heavy handed it would hurt the pirates way more than the shipping company and deters more attempts at piracy.

It'll hurt one group of pirates once, then everybody learns to try with suicide forks. Or develop tactics to take out your self destruct system so they can potentially salvage at least some of the cargo.

Also, what happens when somebody enables your self destruct system while you're docked near a hab or station to unload?

>Let's not even get into how hab assault is like, the shittiest thing to try and do
Infiltrate hab. Select targets. Perform job. Go home.

>your inevitable enemies
Just pin it on Nine Lives.

>you mafia some guys a couple times thinking that will actually deter them?
Getting tortured and not getting paid for the job does tend to be a pretty good deterrent.

>It has to be cheaper just to buy some fucking point defense weapons and be like "if you fly too close we'll fuck your shit".
Okay. You don't need a crew for that.

Pylons aren't exactly going to break randomly and without notice. That's what the maintenance spimes which are already in pretty much every part of the space ship are for, and normal routine maintence as well. I bet you're one of those SHOT TRAP yelling internet engineers.

>I'll agree that it shouldn't be the first layer of defense, but why would this ruin you more than just stealing the stuff in the first place?

Because it's not opportunistic pirates trying to make a buck, its a concerted effort by a competitor to cheaply and with plausible deniability destroy the bulk of your ships. You'll run out of ships and credibility really fast when 90% of your ships get blown up defensively to stop pirates.

RAW, lens crazers don't work on biological eyes. That's silly though. And pulse lasers sure do.


..

In general the best defense against piracy for cheap bulk ships is going to be the difficulty of fencing the 100,000 tons of raw iron or whatever it is you're carrying is. Pirates would need to find some place that can actually buy that much stuff, and won't get kicked over by mercs in retaliation for doing so.

That doesn't leave a long list. For pirates, attacking ships which actually carry valuable cargo/information, or going for hostages on a passenger ship are more lucrative targets.

You're right, deterrant weapons are a good second line.

>But dazzler/crazer/spotter only are noted to detect and work on camera lenses.
So disable that safety feature then.

>It'll hurt one group of pirates once, then everybody learns to try with suicide forks.
You were just going on about how expensive spacecraft are. That's a much bigger deal to the pirates.

>Or develop tactics to take out your self destruct system so they can potentially salvage at least some of the cargo.
Yeah, that sounds way easier than knocking over the hauler full of helpless hibernoids.

>Also, what happens when somebody enables your self destruct system while you're docked near a hab or station to unload?
What happens when somebody enables your guns when you're docked near a hab or station to unload?

>Pylons aren't exactly going to break randomly and without notice.
The fucking engine could break, not the pylon

>Because it's not opportunistic pirates trying to make a buck, its a concerted effort by a competitor to cheaply and with plausible deniability destroy the bulk of your ships. You'll run out of ships and credibility really fast when 90% of your ships get blown up defensively to stop pirates.

Cool story. How is that worse than if the same people just steal yourself, which by the way would be more lucrative for them.

Also, you could stop if it's not working out well.

>A suave, smooth talking freebooter pilfers something valuable from a high speed antimatter courier
>Once resleeved, the pilot tracks the pirate to Jovian space, brutally murders him and recovers the package
>An immortal trillionaire approaches the pilot with a very interesting offer in exchange for the return of his property

>What happens when somebody enables your guns when you're docked near a hab or station to unload?

You poke small holes in things with lasers until port defense pokes you back?

Like, I realize we're in this phase where we just argue about everything, but you should stop and think before you just jump back at me. The amount of energy needed to blow up an entire ship is way more than the output of some omnidirectional laser balls at ship scale, and while it could easily be expensive and painful to have anybody just up and open fire in your direction that's a lot easier to knock off than "the whole ship blows up".

That can happen if you have one engine as well, and then you're double fucked because you can't even thrust off axis. To be clear, I'm talking about the odds of one (1) engine breaking, so don't say something about added complexity.

Most pirates don't have the reach and resources of a shipping company. If they did, they'd probably just go legit. You definitely could stop if it isn't work well, or use a security countermeasure that's less prone to being used against you. For the insurance against having cargoes lost through defensive action you can probably afford some on board security.

>That can happen if you have one engine as well, and then you're double fucked because you can't even thrust off axis. To be clear, I'm talking about the odds of one (1) engine breaking, so don't say something about added complexity.
If you have two engines, the odds of one breaking is twice as high. If one breaks, you're fucked. This isn't an airplane where you can correct for that with the rudder

So...I guess this ISNT the setting to run a simple Alien-like game then, cause ships are boring, empty hallways with no crews. Good to know I suppose.

Just put it on a hab you silly sausage

Anyway, ships with crews canonically exist, like that Titanian generation ship en route to another solar system

Pfft, hallways? What kind of backwards, primitive, luddite, ignorant savage are you? No, we do everything with tiny tubes so gel bots can just squeeze through the ship and rub out hyper-advanced nanos on everything to fix them. Letting AIs and nanos just run and rub on everything is the path forward, all future technology shall be based on AIs rubbing nanos on things! Soon we won't even need tubes, we'll just have tiny CMs built into all important components of the ship and the AI will just tell the ship to fix itself, we wont even need to move things.

What could possibly go wrong!

It would be a great one for that. It's just that some people in /epg/ are autistic about MAXIMUM UTILITY and infomorphs and AI for everything. is right, ships are canonically crewed, and basically due to distrust of AI/AGI/Infomorphs and security concerns.