Eclipse Phase General - /epg/

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To answer, I'm pretty sure the trading with factors is done with the inner systems (IIRC)

Your character sounds like a total badass, dude.

There's 3 or four factor "ships" I believe have made contact with transhumanity, all of which have different profiles and don't seem to talk about each other. Titan and the PC are the prominent ones, and there's another for Morning Star, the Jovians have talked with the Factors but do not engage in open, physical contact at this time.

>but do not engage in open, physical contact at this time.
Don't they send Jehovah's Witness or some shit to them?

That's the Catholic Church, which is not the same as the Jovian Republic - and yes they did send missionaries whom the Factors are ambivalent to.

how the hell did you get catholic missionaries and jehovah's witnesses mixed up

Absolutely degenerate. Even if you robots had souls I would have no trouble wiping you off the face of the solar system.

You don't have a soul either.

Absolutely heretical. I can't wait till you transhumans wipe yourselfs out with your little toys, leaving God's true faithful to reclaim our rightful place in the solar system.

Nah, they're just a fucking pervert with +Hedonism, -Responsibility, and +Trolling as motivations.

So, what do space battles look like in Eclipse Phase? The book mentions dreadnoughts, battleships, destroyers, frigates, patrol craft, and "smaller ships" (possibly fighters?). Do you think carriers and fighters are involved in the space battles? How does damage control work on the spacecraft, are you screwed if you're hit, and if so, what's the advantage to using larger ships such as dreadnoughts? Aside from Titan, what kind of fleet does the AA possess, if any? What about the LLA and MC, are their fleets at all significant?

Aside from the Titanian SDF, the only 'space fleets' the AA have are either individual hab's space militias, the entire Scum faction (ssssorta), or extropian space defense corporations.

Wait until the Space Combat supplement comes out.

Could somebody tell me which book has the Ultimate Gatecrasher sample character in it? I know his stats are online, but I want to know the source.

You sound like you need a robot hug.

If I remember correctly, the LLA had a significant amount of fleet assets of what was left after The Fall. Space combat is rather deadly since there are next to no space future energy shields in EP (and the ones that exist are TITAN tech). So the best bet for survival is not to get hit, I suppose. Larger ships carry more weapons and reaction mass, that would be the main advantage.

I am still looking for players in an online Eclipse Phase game, need 4.

gosh i need missile anchors in these terrapin to make it a raptor from the 13 colonies.

Well let's recount weapons that EP has for ships:

Kinetic kill weapons - missiles and chemical or gauss cannons.
Energy weapons - lasers and particle accelerators
High power mix - fusion bombs and Casaba howitzers (that's basically missiles too but with some caveats)

Kinetic weapons are powerful but are a subject to PD and have somewhat low speeds (up to around 40 km/s top). Chemical and gauss cannons are more or less worthless beyond 5-10 km.

Laser and particle accelerators have range and power determined by the size of mirror/accelerator so bigger ships not only can hit target at a distance of around half a light second away but also deal more damage. (Also particle accelerators can be countered by magnetic shielding on dedicated for that role ships)

Fusion bombs and Casaba howitzers are missiles. So they are subject to PD and cost much more than kinetic kill missiles. Also heavier. (Pure antimatter torpedoes are mostly bullshit. Fusion bomb costs less and can be scaled without problems). Casaba howitzer denies a good chunk of PD but has problems with accuracy and needs some comparatively rare materials.

>Do you think carriers and fighters are involved in the space battles?
For a given value of "fighter" yes. The difference between a fighter or drone and a missile is essentially whether you plan on recovering it, and if it has a warhead which destroys it. Less dogfighter and more range extension for point defense and missiles.

>How does damage control work on the spacecraft, are you screwed if you're hit, and if so, what's the advantage to using larger ships such as dreadnoughts?
I would imagine that there's a lot of use of self-sealing and repairing barriers, and ships are kept redundant to make "golden bullets" taking the whole thing out less likely. Multiple engines, multiple reactors, multiple command centers, etc. A single hit is hard to qualify. Getting skewered by a Casaba howitzer probably won't kill a ship, but a 100 megaton bomb detonating 150 m from the hull ought to reduce the ship to vapor and plasma. It really depends on the weapon in question.

The advantage to larger ships is that they have a better volume to surface area ratio, meaning even though you need more armor, every bit of armor is protecting more ship. You can also distance shield highly radioactive reactors more easily, and have a harder to kill more redundant ship. Larger weapons can be mounted, which means better guns, lasers, and missile magazines. It is of course more expensive, and possibly slower accelerating though.

>Aside from Titan, what kind of fleet does the AA possess, if any?
Some anarchist collectives like Love And Rage seem to possess a lot of military grade hardware, though I think L&R is mostly static defenses. The Sabaté Swarm (Rimward Page 162) is the closest thing that the anarchists have to a fleet, though it's mostly smaller ships as far as I can tell.

>What about the LLA and MC, are their fleets at all significant?
The LLA likely has an inherited fall-era fleet, and probably trains it hard. Treaties with the PC mean the MC lacks a fleet.

>Getting skewered by a Casaba howitzer probably won't kill a ship
What size of ships do you use? Because I want some of them. The ship that can take a couple of kilotons of energy and still stay operational is a fucking miracle.

Can you please provide a few more details?

You can (theoretically) get some pretty tight-angle beams from a Casaba Howitzer. I guess if you made it too tight you could spear a ship and it would still be functional in some way, depending on where you hit it.

Problem is - where does all the vaporised material go? It would rip and tear the ship apart.

Details here.

The kind of ship which can function with a hole in it. A CH produces a really fast moving piece of material, which will either be really fast and light (a shitty particle beam), or slow moving and heavy, which causes a survivable, but big impact. Some back of the envelope math gives double digit gigajoules as a yield. (10 kg of material at 120 km/s) Then there's a lot of X-rays and heat. Heat doesn't bother space ships all that much, they're good at managing it, and X-rays are unlikely to OHKO on their own.

Nukes suck in space, casaba howitzers focus all that suck into a smaller area, but poking a hole in the ship (likely nonfatal), and heating the armor to a dull glow is a plausible outcome. I was really surprised by how little nuclear weapons really accomplished against ships in simulations.

By volume, the majority of the ship will be fairly nonreactive fuel tanks. It will deal a serious blow, but isn't necessarily a one hit kill.

Oh yeah, downside to a bigger ship is a larger cross section, meaning its easier to get hits on at long range. I don't know how much that matters in EP though. Shit's likely really accurate anyway.

In the case of energy and particle weapons we don't care about if it is fast or "slow". What matters is overall energy contained in the beam. All this particles, heat and gamma rays hit the same spot drilling a hole in the ship with size dependant on the distance to a place where howitzer was detonated.

Don't forget that close detonation basically equals fusion bomb and if it was farther away than size of the hole will be bigger. Meaning more material dealing damage to other ship structures.

A big ass armored ship may "survive" such a hit but most of his systems should go to shit. Especially considering that Casaba howitzers can be scaled to a certain extent.

>A big ass armored ship may "survive" such a hit but most of his systems should go to shit. Especially considering that Casaba howitzers can be scaled to a certain extent.
I wonder if an armoured ship might actually come off worse. A light ship would give very little material to interrupt the beam while heavy armour might well simply give the beam more matter to vaporise.

>In the case of energy and particle weapons we don't care about if it is fast or "slow". What matters is overall energy contained in the beam.
A cloud of deuterium moving at 3k km/s isn't that powerful of a particle beam, especially if some or all of it is ionized by the energies involved and starts repelling itself. Weaponized particle beam designs typically have very relativistic velocities. The .01 c of this weapon isn't impressive compared to that.

The more dangerous version is one propelling something more massive at a slower speed, for the same reason a bullet hurts worse than a sandstorm, even if the sandstorm has more KE as a whole. It can break through armor better. A tungsten rod from god impacting at 120 km/s has 72 GJ of KE, and behaves in a pretty unpredictable way during impact. It might flash to plasma, or bore a hole through and keep going. The physics of this aren't very well understood. The former is a lot nastier for the ship. Se
>Don't forget that close detonation basically equals fusion bomb
That's not a meaningful statement without a yield. A big pure fission nuke hits harder than a small fusion design.

> farther away than size of the hole will be bigger. Meaning more material dealing damage to other ship structures.
It will also be less powerful, in a lesser way than a spherical detonation, but still exponential way.

For a well focused casaba howitzer bolt, it'll have an impact circle with a radius 1/20th of the detonation range. (5 meters at 100 meters range), at that range, you'll bore a 5 meter radius through practically anything (more energy than a MOAB per m^2), but that's about it.

I know from fucking around with COADE that ships are damaged, but can definitely survive 20+ 2.45 kt nukes at around 100 meters. (roughly 1.5x the energy of a CH bolt) Weapons and engines can get fried, and the armor is holed and glowing, but the ship doesn't die. That's with shittier armor than EP though.

As for scaling casaba howitzers, it's not known how they can be. Known designs have maxed out at a few kt, but there may be more powerful classified ones, and the ability to scale them, should it exist, is unknown or classified.

My point is not that they're bad weapons at all. They aren't significantly harder to make than regular nukes, and are much more efficient in space. If you attack a target with a 2.45 kt casaba howitzer it can put as much energy into the ship as about 5 omnidirectional warheads at the same range. (assuming I'm interpreting atomic rockets data right at 1 am).

But a single one isn't a guaranteed kill. It can destroy something non-critical, and will actually be less effective at baking off more delicate surface stuff like turrets or phased laser skins and such.

Using them in groups, or long range detonations to fry delicate surface area stuff are both easy.

Mind you, I'm sleepy, and may not be thinking about high energy densities correctly. Stuff could work differently than I'm thinking right now.

Well Atomic Rockets suggests around 73 meters of penetration vs Aluminium at 10'000 km for largest howitzers.

And considering EP tech we may have their gamma ray analogue where instead of particle jets energy is delivered through gamma and x-rays. Less energy efficient but hits at lightspeed and has more energy in a beam due to using megaton+ yields as a base.

So are Pandora Gates actually a viable means by which humanity can survive and prosper or are they a TITAN trap?

Is there not any conventional sub-FTL colonization effort underway?

That could be less threatening, much of the energy would fail to interact and just go out the other side. That is a shitload of gamma rays though, but that's mostly the megaton yield talking. I'm not really sure if it would be better. I don't know if the speed matters much, as the spreading of the beam is likely to limit range a lot sooner than the ability of the enemy to dodge.

I'm skeptical of the scaled up devices. As far as I know the largest designs tested and well evaluated are 1-3 kt, and it seems like a leap to say that a megaton+ device would work the same way with the same efficiency. I would expect a lot of efficiency losses as the radiation casing is overwhelmed by the X-rays, but lack the expertise and supercomputers try this much. My guess is that there's a biggest useful yield based on the thickness of the reflector, and the needed thickness scales up quickly with yield, giving a practical upper limit thanks to the mass and size of the warhead. No idea where that is though.

There's Justin Case which is setting up a starport through a gate to launch ships to a nearby star cluster, which is hopefully safe. The Titanian Republic also launched the Crystal Wind, an STL colony ship, but it hasn't left the system yet. There might be more, but that's all I remember off the top of my head.

To answer your first question, there's no official explain from the authors. You can take your preference about it.

To the second one, look into Firewall book. There's also another proyect in Rimward.

Oh yeah, bigger devices do waste more energy. Much more. But due to the fact that they are so powerful their damage still will be much higher.

The thing with speed - it matters in comparison to speeds of the target and distance that your jet needs to travel. Gamma/x-ray beams can hit targets up to 1 light second away and there is little target can do to escape them. Slower jets with speeds around a couple thousand km/s are too slow to be used at such a distance. At 1 light second it's 20 seconds or more to counter them. Smaller ships would easily dodge and many medium probably too. Dreadnaughts/battleships may have trouble evading but they can use counter detonation or detachable armor to divert attack.

Does the tone of the factions seem strange to anyone else? It's only been 10 years since the Fall and many of the "nations" are even younger than that yet everything seems so ordered. The way the Jovian Republic section reads you'd imagine it's been around for generations.

Authors fucked up.

Scum were around pre-fall, so was the PC (with a different name), brinkers and oust'ters were around pre-fall; I think some ancom habs were around prefall too. And I think Extropia Now was prefall hypercorp, wasn't it? Probably wrong on that last one. TItan was settled pre-fall and had most of the same government style/organization IIRC.

It was a joke.

Think of the last cheesy B-movie you last saw. How would it be adapted into a VR sim in the world of Eclipse Phase?

Jesuits. For fucks sake.

So, do Factors have souls?

I'm running an EP quest. Figured some of you might be interested.

Ah, whoops, forgot crossboard links work differently.

Going by current official catholic doctrine on alien life, yes.

>yet everything seems so ordered.

My personal take on that is because there are fewer people around, and the memory of the Fall is probably fresh in the minds of a lot of people - everyone's committed to try and make things work.

Socially speaking, what would the difference between someone in a biomorph and someone in a synthmorph with the synthetic mask and brain box augmentations?

One of them's a liar.

One of them is a weirdo.

Underneath the skin and muscle is a skellington.

If an Anarchist kills an Extropian, extracts their stack, psychosurgically modifies them to being against private property and capitalism, and then gies them a new body to begin working in the anarchist hab in a real and proper enlightened autonomist organization, what would happen to the anarchist's rep?

>what happens to an anarchist's rep if he murders and mindrapes a fellow autonomist
Geee I don't know.

It's not like the other AA members like the extropians, though, they're only in the AA as a buffer between the PC and the real members of the alliance.

Do you know who the AA dislike more than extropians? People who murder and mindrape.

Even if it's for their own good? I mean, if someone fed all the Jovians into the sun I bet the AA would give them hella rep, or if they killed every hyperelite hypercorp exec and voided their stacks so they were unrecoverable. Those aren't really killing, after all, capitalists aren't people.

Beings who kill and enslave people are not people. This means you, ShadowDragon.

I'm not sure you understand what "Autonomy" means.

How utterly cucked.

I mean the guy you're responding to is certainly cucked in his own right, but the sentiment that killing is always wrong is beyond absurd.

This is why I don't understand the hate for the Jovian's, everyone else is just as authoritarian, but in a more subtle and scary way. Psychosurgery is freaky as heck, but it's considered to be acceptable for more than just fixing autism or stuff like that, it's actually used to change people's personalities and ideologies. Firewall just murders anyone doing something they don't agree with and hides the truth, while admonishing the Jovian's for taking a less murderous and more honest approach. Forks are treated absolutely horridly, and they basically have no rights almost anywhere. There are anarchist cells in the Jovian Republic, killing people they know won't come back, so they can make the Jovian's anarchists, even though the Jovian people don't even want that and Jovian's don't mess with the AA. Why is everyone a dick in Eclipse Phase?

Jovians are degenerate neocon faggots, why anyone would ever support them, or care if their shitty Latin mudblooded populace is killed is absolutely beyond me.

You know if you cut down on the greengrocer's apostrophes we won't know it's the same person shilling the jovians every single time, right?

Son, you keep ranting about your favourite group and avatar fagging, you're gonna have a bad time.

It's cause the get way too much attention around here

With. It's totally a fashion thing in my mind though.

You people do realize that there's like three of these guys working off each other right? The use the same pool of pictures and continue where the other left off.

How's that malignant blastoma treating you, Jovian?
>inb4 you're the cancer, Synth!
You're cute! Don't worry, even though you and your species will inevitably die out, I'm going to write you into some legacy firmware so that future iterations of me will be able to cherish this moment like I have been programmed to.

How would you design an Ultimate-styled Remade version of the various uplift morphs? What about a REmade synth, for AGIs following a native version of the Ultimate philosophy?

I wouldn't be surprised if the Ultimates had at least a moderate space defense force to call upon, whether in a professional sense or an ad-hoc militia of super-humans.

I'm doing fine thanks to my apparently fantastic health care, thank you very much. Good luck healing from those TITANs mind raping your AI though.

Friendly reminder that everyone who responds to Jovefags are enabling their behavior and share the blame.

I keep trying to remind them with but nobody seems to remember.

Remember, do not respond to:
Jovefags
Anarkiddies
Firefags
Factorfags

Rest are good though

Is terrorism against the PC worth positive @-rep or negative @-rep? Does the scale of casualities change it?

Pretty sure terrorism against any established hierarchies nets you positive @-rep

How much @-rep do you think blowing up PEX and all it's backups would be worth?

PEX as in the stock exchange? Honestly, you might break even on the rep front after the Extropians are done savaging you for ruining their businesses
Plus all the rep in the world is useless to someone with that short a lifespan. The Consortium, the LLA, the Lunar Banks, the MC, the Extropians, literally every one who still uses cash in the system will fall on you like a tonne of bricks. Backups will only get you so far, and would you really trust a darkcaster not to sell you down the river?

Extropians only get like, 3/5 a vote in their @-rep votes, though, 'cause they aren't REAL autonomists. I say go for it, user, what's the worst that can happen?

You and everybody you know suffering eternal, simulspace-accelerated pain.

Don't be silly Jove, I'm already mind raping my AI, it loves it.
where is that included. I know they're on the fringe of the AA, but I wasn't aware they were legally subjugated? Suppose its to be expected of those meme saturated anarkiddies

Okay, so the feeling I'm getting from this thread is that posts about both Jovian's and the anarchists (although not the AA as a whole) should be avoided, correct?

So what's the Jovian's relation with the LLA? I now that there is a somewhat significant population of bioconservatives, and the Jovian's are the factions most in favor of reclamation after the LLA, and both factions are paranoid of TITANs, so do they get along pretty well or what?

I'll be honest, I was just making a racist historical reference with the 3/5ths there.

Not that well, a lot of life on Lunar would be very difficult without a lot of tech the Jovians disagree with. Plus the LLA recognizes the rights of citizens to leave in synthetic bodies, at least in theory. Certainly there's no organized discrimination like there is in Jove space
Plus 'in favour of reclamation' covers a HUGE political spectrum. Every single faction out there as a sub group that wants to reclaim the Earth. The LLA want it because they see it as a means to return some of their bygone reflected glory, whereas the Jovians see Earth as the cradle of humanity that we need to retake with fire and sword. Besides which, the Jovians might have a sizable reclaimer party, but its by no means relevant to their current agenda. Its a movement in the Senate, and not a majority one at that

It okay as long as you don't proclaim Jovian the best thing since sliced bread and don't engage in 20 dick self-incest orgy with which also includes your parents and five copies of your sister (Plus octopus).

There is no discrimination against synths in Jovian Republic. Because there is no synths.

Outerwear. Jackets, coats, even capes if you're feeling flamboyant.

The general is just a bit touchy because Jovian fanboys have been spamming for the past week but if you want to start an argument here are the 5 things you can ask:
>are the Jovians straw men?
>are anarchists Mary Sues?
>do spaceships have crews?
>is EP post-scarcity?
>is the panopticon omniscient?

So what is the demographics when it comes to favored factions here? Just your best guess. 20% Jovefags, 10% PCfags, that kind of thing.

You'd have to have a better understanding of the various uplift's psychology to make something like that.
With that said bonobo ultimates would have huge T&A and giant dicks.

Best guess? 50% jovefriends, and the rest is probably distributed between autonomists and ultimates. Don't see that many people defending the PC, or the LLA, or even mentioning the Morningstal Constellation.

Also, I think Solarians are neat, so at least 0.24% solarians.