>Thanks to advances in man/machine interface pilots have the ability to transfer their conciousness into the chassis of advanced air and space fighter craft
>This is done by creating a partial clone which really only needs the brain, spinal column and nervous system which are connected to a "Black Box" that acts as a life support system and can plug into and out of various chassis for tactical flexibility
Doing this has allowed these fighters to be used in ways that would kill a normal pilot physically seated in the cockpit as well as extended long range missions that a normal human would not be able to do.
>The primary disadvantage is the condition known as longing where the pilot will begin to experience mental and emotional degradation from being outside their original bodies.
>The safest operating time allowed in this manner is up to a full week for most pilots until the more severe affect of Longing begin to take hold
>You and your strike wing have been out on an extended patrol mission and word has spread of a suprise attack that is preventing you from rejoining with the Fleet and you're 3 days in towards your maximum operating time.
Thanks to advances in man/machine interface pilots have the ability to transfer their conciousness into the chassis of...
>The primary disadvantage is the condition known as longing where the pilot will begin to experience mental and emotional degradation from being outside their original bodies.
If you've got the technology to do shit like this, and also clone human body parts, couldn't human clones be outfitted with cybernetic bodies that they can be plugged into that allow them to experience humanity more or less the same as a human body?
Potentially, you could actually incorporate such a cybernetic body into the pilot's chamber itself, and it's jettisoned in case the craft gets damaged. The pilot can now act on their own or even be outfitted with an armored combat morph body to continue their fight on the ground until they can be recovered or even just to cause as much havoc as they can behind enemy lines.
The black box can't carry a spare body. It's literally just the brain and spinal cord and a few cybernetic organs to simulate certain body functions needed to keep the brain acting normally. Not only that the Black Box needs to be plugged out of the craft and into another unit so while you can eject the black box you're pretty stuck until serivce personnel can pick you up and stablize you.
Worst case scenario you can be put sleep to stave off the effects of Longing but doing so with no guarantee of pick up is dangerous as you can't disengage the process once done.
I really do love the look of the Longsword, shame we never got a Halo level where we get to use one
And for something relevant to the topic at hand, a few months ago after watching pacific rim I was toying with a similar idea to yours, only instead of one person it would be two or three different people, maybe more, hooked up together to create an amalgamation of there minds, a brand new 'Gestalt Personality', to pilot combat vehicles or ships, with the new personality ceasing to exist when the pilots disconnected and its memories being held by the pilots or in a computer system when it was on its down time, only to be re-uploaded when the pilots came back together.
I then began to wonder what happens when the pilots and the gestalt personality have disagreements with each other, or if the amalgamation of the pilots didn't want to be disconnected...
So would the three personalities be aware along with the gestalt personality? or would the actions of the team affect their ability to mega merge as it were and cause problems for the gestalt?
I don't think that the pilots would be aware during the 'merge', so to speak, and I could definitely see something like the second part of your post happening.
As for the 'disagreements', I remember I had a few scenarios planed out, but now the only one I can remember is:
>The pilots following orders that the Amalgamation disagrees with, or vice-versa
How do they keep the organic parts protected from G forces?
Think about it - you need your sensory cortex available to do all the really fancy bonus shit your aircraft can do (it's not just being able to handle the extra gees, if that were it - screw it, we'd use drones, it's that a human brain, when you start opening up the sensory cortex to non sensory tasks is capable of incredible processing, this is why many synesthetic savants are capable of so much incredible calculation)
the pilots cease to be able to experience normal sight, sound, or tactile interface, a cybernetic body would limit their ability to rapidly process the spectral datacube or the sonic "Tactile" experience from the hull which is the real purpose of these brains
You see- it takes an immense amount of time for a computer to dump information from a hyperspectral scanner, but even though the human brain was built originally to handle only three colors of information, it handles hyperspectral data fast, and well - this is why we started this program, a human who loses all o their senses but those associated with being a tactical or strategic aircraft is able to make sense of the remote sensing data in a much shorter lead time than the cray supercomputers that make the flight trivially easy could.
They can identify specific materials - tell if digging has happened, sense if other aircraft are nearby not only with their radar "Ears" and sense of "smell" but through the rippling of disturbed air against their "skin" the whole craft is built soft, flexible, it's aeroelasticity designed to deform with the variable pressures associated with different speeds and altitudes to be optimal at each, but also to provide feedback to the pilot based on the currents of air - sonic booms one thousand miles away telegraphing the lightest hint of a brush, like the hair of the woman you love across your neck...
The longing is that these feelings... they rob you of your body, your brain knows it is unnatural, you haven't tasted, you haven't really smelled.
you begin to feel distanced - emotionally detached - it is highly classified what happens to these pilots, but without a connection to their bodies, their families, their friends, their units.... the experience of all that firepower, the ability to really fly? it makes you feel like a god. It makes you feel powerful....
They go rogue, they kill. they go mad. They forget who they were, they..... aren't human and don't care to be.
Why love? Why breed? Why be loyal to a nation, a god, anything - if you could just be a god yourself?
probably a gel encasing not only encasing but impregnating them, also when they were cloned they probably would have needed somekind of additional framework.
A mixture of as well as a mechanical heart that can keep blood flow to the brain against really high g forces. The gel itself would probably be some sort of super science non-newtonian fluid with nano machines to help regulate the squishy bits
Very nice. I also would imagine prolonged stays in that state and then returning to your body would incur some problems such as phantom limb syndrome or limbs spasms and eratic movements or the total lost of certain senses (i.e. while in your meat body you only hear muffled ringing while in the plane you have essentially RADAR and omnidirectional hearing)
>a full week
How much fuel do these planes carry?
My guess is thorium salt reactors (Needs to be able to run for 10,000 years to keep th elife support rollin')
Probably would carry spare fuel containers of [insert small but energy dense fuel here] and, seeing as they can operate in vacuum and in space maybe while doing missions in space they don't keep the engines going or something or they just come back and refuel and head out again.
The point being is they can stay in that condition for a week before having to go back into their bodies.
With a set up like this I imagine you'd see people in the military (assuming it's military) that would otherwise be discharged being injured but can still stay on because technically you don't need your body so long as you can still have your mind go into these weapons and taken out again.
So while you may be some kind of Ace and commander, when you're in your meat body you can't walk without medical braces and a cain because your brain will sometimes misfire it's signals to your legs and you fall over yourself.
i turn into a jet...
Soooo
I could say that I sexualy identify as an attack helicopter unironically?
Sign me up.
I wouldn't want to be an attack helicopter simply because a hadji with an rpg could turn me into black hawk down.
That's only half the time. The other half you're on the ground having your body dismantled just so you won't fall apart the next time you fly. God never had to deal with that.
I can just imagine a brain in a jar is cracking bad jokes/trying to be suave or something with the technicians and family while his body is being re-assembled.
>at least all your marriages are safe from me now heh
>did you know that the brain is your largest sexual organ?
>I assure you, I'm entirely 'armless
...
I'm really bad at this.
Your premise sounds pointlessly grim when we already have ai pilots that can out fly human pilots.
When I came up with this I was going to try and find someway to shoehorn something about psychic powers somehow and resistance towards such a thing like having a cannon that can focus your telekinetic force and multi tasking greater then what a computer could allow you to do.
Like Gundam's psychomu/Zero system except without the humaniod body shape.
It's a trick. Peter Watts's Reverent basically.
>First, there's the pod people, the betas - neural images of scientists and contact experts, mapped on to quick-grown copies of the local species closest to humanity. They're social, vaguely primate, and capable of independent reasoning and tool use - and seem to act as biological waldos for the meta-ecology, capable of interfacing with and overriding individual organisms, as well as uploading data, and possibly whole personality emulations, to the global network. That necessitates a whole new level of caution. The neural images are stripped down, ripped of all the relevant knowledge that might be accessed by the meta-ecology; how our technology works, how many of us there are, all of that - including the knowledge that would let the pod people realize there's no fucking way to get a consistent signal from orbit. The poor dumb bastards think that they're actually puppets, remotely piloted, rather than just being disposable clones with experience playback tech implanted everywhere, dumping brainstates and sensory data back to their originals whenever there's a moment of clear sky to get a laser comm to work.