/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

Her finger is on the trigger, she has the weapon drawn for no reason, and she has no idea where she is pointing it. That is not trigger discipline.

So is there a difference between an ASI, a seed AI, a Promethean, and a TITAN?

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The major difference is that a Promethean probably isn't infected.

Seed AIs are AIs designed to become ASIs. The TITANs and Prometheans are particular ASIs.

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So what would be the best measures to take before heading into combat with TITAN machines? What morphs should you use, what equipment should you bring, what technology should you stay away from, what vehicles are best, what tactics are preferred, etc?

Buy a nice backup insurance umbrella policy

Right, but I'm talking big warfare here. You're not going alone, you've forked yourself and made hundreds of AGI's, and you've got a small army together. The question is what is the best loadout to fight them and avoid subversion and hacking.

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Personally I would go with timed detonation nuclear warheads on purely ballistic trajectories

Faraday Mods installed. Wi-fi off ("Autistic mode"). Communicate only via line of sight with a laser link, or by handsigns or verbalizing. Commanders interface over the distance via quantum encrypted devices and only in short intervals.

Bring fire. One thing most TITAN machines can't do is directly eat energy. Thermal effects like a torch, plasma or incendiary weapons are hot enough to boil them up. Do not rely on seekers or kinetics, they have countermeasure technology. ABG. Always. Be. Guardian Swarming. Also, keep EMP bombs stuck on your body as an emergency measure, nanoswarms dislike it. If you're religiously opposed to your own nanoswarms, then you better hope that God does divine intercession for Uncle Vengeance and start praying.

Do not use a single fork or AI line, or arm everybody with a Dead Switch. Preferably both. It's possible capture and analysis will expose vulnerabilities other units can exploit.

Isolate and overwhelm the enemy. Use their stalking tactics against them. If possible, deny communications - machines only get smarter the more of them are hooked up. Deny access to repair and recharging facilities first. Target the smartest machine in the group, not the most heavily armed. Do not use active sensors, you will be seen. You will probably be seen anyway, so have a backup plan.

Individual tactics depend on the threat profile of a given machine.

When in doubt, blow it all up. Touch nothing - contain or destroy everything.

You're mostly going to want neutron bombs.

Thank you user. Will keep this in mind for future operations.

Should I make sure nobody is using a cyberbrain, or is that unnecessary? It doesn't matter whether they're using biomorphs or synths so long as they have an organic brain, right?

Or does the Faraday mod make all this irrelevant anyways?

Assume the TITAN will disable half of your equipment before the fight even starts. The shielding might work but you want a backup if it doesn't.

So biomorphs and organic brains are the more reliable of the two then (albeit weaker in combat). Okay.

Hmmm...clearing out the Martian quarantine zone is gonna take a lot of morphs. Better put than under "long term stretch goals"

I really wish i could get comfortable with this setting. I've read through it casually a few times and it seems like every time i find something i think is standout awesome, something smacks my enthusiasm down.

Big chunks of it basically read like the kitchen sink of all the stuff i like. Weird eldritch threats that actually do come across as alien in a genuine manner. Cyborgs up everywhere. Whatever Nietzschean shit the Ultimates have going on.

Then you get to the stuff thats just hilariously awful. Like the entire habitats full of people who smoke like chimneys and who'd sell their own mother out for cigarettes, and every single thing to do with the economy and 'wage slavery maaaaan!' and every anarchist habitat in the outer system that somehow keeps functioning via the unbridled reality warping force of creator bias.

(Oh. And Sun-Whales. Although i think the Salamanders look cool as fuck personally and like the idea of solar creatures, the whales are a bit much.)

Plus i just don't believe most humans would accept stuff like a machine that kills you and transmits a copy of you over long distances and think of it as transport. An emergency reaction to certain death, sure. But a way of casually travelling? You're immortal anyway guys. Take the shuttle.

I mean, transferring body to body is less stressful because you could sync them up next to one another, run the personality in both of them simultaneously and then just disconnect the old one (or yknow, just go with the GITS route and encase brains in a shell that can be swapped from body to body -easily achievable in universe sd far as i can tell and avoids the whole issue) but a suicide booth with a transmitter on it?

And then there are just the awkward small niggles that bug me. Like, why would anyone ever use pods, especially that giant crab one, when robots do it better and dont take months to grow? And how is slavery a thing if i can just break one ego and then copy it until i have an army of slaves?

Would the explanation that some people don't think the same way you do about these things be enough for you to accept that the setting has people who think differently to you?

>And then there are just the awkward small niggles that bug me. Like, why would anyone ever use pods, especially that giant crab one, when robots do it better and dont take months to grow? And how is slavery a thing if i can just break one ego and then copy it until i have an army of slaves?
The rest of it is just people thinking differently, but I would actually like an answer to this part of his question.

on the whole copy transfer kill thing

thats exactly how a startrek transporter works they just dont make a big deal out of it most of the time

Some people don't like sleeving in purely synthetic morphs; there's a certain stigma attached to these sort of morphs. According to the rules, you can stick a cyberbrain into a robot and treat it like a morph. People don't do it because it's weird and distasteful in most places.

On the slavery front, it depends where and how you're doing it. Some jurisdictions will allow regulated-slavery-in-the-form-of-indenture, but making alpha forks is illegal. People who are in areas that practice completely unregulated slavery probably likely don't have many rules regarding forking, and so do make use of forking to increase the number of egos they've got available. If you're buying some black market egos to use as indentures, though, you probably don't want forks; a brainprint scan could suddenly show that this ego is registered in a database somewhere else. I'm not sure why you'd turn to the black market slave trade in a situation where you've got access to IndEX, but perhaps you don't want to leave such a paper trail.

Broadly speaking, it's because indenture is generally legal in places where alpha forking is not.

(I'm gonna assume we're talking about the farcasting thing.)

I can accept some people thinking about farcasting (thats what thats called right?) differently enough from me that some people would use it without issue.

But i can't accept that the vast majority of humanity would do this when they understand the technology at work. And that seems to be whats indicated? That farcasting is standard for life and no one really considers it weird?

The survival instinct is a pretty massive fucking thing to overcome. People have arguments today about how the Star Trek transporters are murder boxes. And the transporter technicians didn't have to drag Kirk's corpse out of the machine when they were done.

That's the thing. The vast majority of humanity didn't accept farcasting without issue. Conveniently, the vast majority of that vast majority was killed in the Fall.

I think its cultural
Imagine growing up in EP and being exposed to all of it since you can remember. hell I cant remmber, is there even an age limit on farcasting?
you might have been farcasted long before you grasped what is actuallly going on.

Pretty much that. Those what wanted to survive so desperately - the survival instinct! - were willing to egocast off planet during the Fall, even though for the most part there was absolutely no guarantee that there'd be a body waiting for them at the other end (hence lots of egos in cold storage from the Fall). Those who were rich enough or lucky enough could get off with their bodies intact.

After you've done it once and woken up with a feeling of continuity, it's a little easier to do it the next time. Some people in the setting likely do feel uncomfortable about doing it, to varying degrees, with varying degrees of acceptance.

If you wanted to play somebody like that, you could probably treat it as a phobia disorder negative trait, and maybe force them to make continuity tests whenever they egocast.

Hm. You know, that's probably the most satisfying answer i could really get. Although I'm displaying this point of view now and if it had been me i would have still farcasted a copy of myself offworld before trying to survive the normal way.

Its not like im saying anyone would have to be insane to use the technology. Just that i'd expect a bigger chunk of the population to be really uncomfortable with it. But as far as i can tell, if you do that you get labelled as backwards or something?

I guess people don't like being told they arent them because they were sent via Murderportation.

Ah well, thanks anyway. Thats honestly helped me like the setting a lot more.

(Not sure if i could play a game where my character takes eight months waiting on an asteroid barge to catch up to my instant teleportation using fellows though).

I know that pod morphs are better for comfort and reputation and stuff like that. But the giant crab morph is just a giant crab. Its basically gonna get used for construction or maybe for military uses? It just seems a massive effort when a giant crab robot would be easier and probably less gross.

I'll take your word on the slavery thing, because i honestly dont know enough about the setting to really say anything more on it.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. It's not like you have to kill yourself in real life anyways. Most of the time I play an AGI or morph who knows that farcasting kills him but either doesn't care, or just forks himself there instead.

To be honest, if i was going to play a game in EP something appeals to me about the idea of being just some poor nobody on a crappy station somewhere barely scraping along with nothing to his name. The sort of person for whom saving up to buy a low level gun is a great achievement.

So farcasting probably isn't going to come into it anyway.

Then again, im not even sure EP has an equivalent to an urchan type character. It seems like its straining so hard to be a utopia in places it seems like even the harshest people's lives (outside of actual slavery and that sort of thing) has got to be okay. And when you can go to the replicator and print out whatever you like, being an alladdin-esque street rat is probably pretty different.

Being on earth could be cool i suppose. The constant and ever-present danger probably takes the edge off the vacuous utopia post-scarcity.

>Just that i'd expect a bigger chunk of the population to be really uncomfortable with it. But as far as i can tell, if you do that you get labelled as backwards or something?

Some people would. Some people wouldn't. There's quite a few different viewpoints on the matter that can exist. I think the main reason that I get wary about people going "I wanna play a character that won't use egocasting!" or "I wanna play a character that won't resleeve!" or "I wanna play a character that doesn't know anything at all about the setting!" is that it makes running games needlessly difficult.

A character that doesn't like egocasting, finds the idea stressful and suffers from existential angst about the whole process is fine if they're willing to take one for the team when required and go through with it. If the player refuses to budge because it's what they want their character to do, then it becomes a complete drag on the game. I've seen way more "I won't do this ever!" absolutism in characters than "I don't like doing this, but..." characters; the former holds the game to ransom, the latter allows for character development and keeps the game going. Keep in mind that what you're reading is a roleplaying game that is supposed to be played, not an exercise in world-building.

>It just seems a massive effort when a giant crab robot would be easier and probably less gross.

You know that some people are going to find the idea of sleeving into a purely synthetic morph to be more distasteful than one that's partly organic, right? Granted, I think you'd be a bit odd to want to sleeve into a giant crab, but it strikes me as reasonable to accept that other people would have different views on that. I think piercings are gross, but I accept that some people like them, and others don't really have a strong opinion either way.

>Then again, im not even sure EP has an equivalent to an urchan type character.

This is just, obviously, my opinion, but I don't think there's anything stopping you running a game where that sort of thing is a practical choice. I like Firewall as a premise because it serves as a way for bringing multiple characters with disparate backgrounds together, and provides a structure for a campaign that can be expanded out of if required. A campaign where you're down and out in the Pits of Extropia could be very fun, for instance, but it would require everyone to be on the same page in terms of the characters they're going to play compared to a Firewall game.

There are different ways you can go with it. While not resleeving or being a bioconservative certainly makes the game harder, it also makes it very interesting.

One thing I like to do is play as an AGI created by bioconservatives to protect humanity. It releases me from the standard worries about "dying" or "having a soul", allows me to use all the good tech available, and let's me keep by real life values while I'm at it.

>let's me keep by real life values while I'm at it.

Yikes!

Yikes?

Yeah, yikes. I find the idea of having to play a character that reflects your personal values in a roleplaying game to be a bit weird to say the least.

I don't always do that. Heck, I've also loved playing an extropian merchant, Jovian agent, LLA reclaimer, and Ultimate operative. But it does make it slightly easier to roleplay when I don't have to change my worldview on suicide.

Oh yeah. Id never play that sort of character unless everyone else wanted a similar kind of game. Like said, theres making a character and then there's making a character that gets in everyone's fucking way. The game should always comes first.

If i was going to make a character for a game where firewall or farcasting was a thing, id think a way for my character to be okay with it or think around it or whatever. I was just talking in terms of pure world building about how awkward i found the idea.

That's actually a pretty interesting idea on the whole thing. I imagine it helps a bunch on the roleplay front and would probably have a lot of amusing or interesting reactions to be playing against type for perfectly sensible reasons.

Fair enough! I'm sorry for leaping to the wrong conclusion. I guess I've just seen so many arguments about why the game is shit that boil down to "Eclipse Phase is bad because my personal values are not the ones solely reflected in the game".

Is there room for playable cutesy robot sidekicks, like the ones in Ulysses 31 or Battlestar Galactica?

It's fine if there isn't. I'm just wondering.

Yup, you can be a cute robot, badass robot, AI in a head (think Cortana), AI in the flesh, brain in a jar in a robot, etc.

Yes. Sort of. Maybe.

Nice! Now for the hard part: playing the role in a way that isn't annoying to the rest of the group.

I suggest communicating entirely in Beep-Boops, Whistles and that one squeal R2-D2 made sometimes that sounded like he got his dick trapped in a car door and was surprised to find how much he enjoyed the agony.

Right. This game is a little hard to get into, I'll admit. There's a lot to take in and adapt to, but at least it lends itself to adventures and campaigns well (something Transhuman Space has trouble with).

I'd communicate in an over-the-top "cowboy American" accent, with enough y'alls to go around, y'hear?

REMOVE SURYA

>Plus i just don't believe most humans would accept stuff like a machine that kills you and transmits a copy of you over long distances and think of it as transport. An emergency reaction to certain death, sure. But a way of casually travelling? You're immortal anyway guys. Take the shuttle.
>I mean, transferring body to body is less stressful because you could sync them up next to one another, run the personality in both of them simultaneously and then just disconnect the old one (or yknow, just go with the GITS route and encase brains in a shell that can be swapped from body to body -easily achievable in universe sd far as i can tell and avoids the whole issue) but a suicide booth with a transmitter on it?

First off, egocasting is philosophically no worse than teleportation, which is a well-established SF trope.

Secondly, you're using a very limited definition of selfhood. It's much more useful to think of a person as a computational process. After all, if you thought of a robot as a person and migrated the code to new hardware, you wouldn't think of it as a different person now would you? Once you accept that a human is just a self-aware meat robot that happened by accident you're already half-way there

>Take the shuttle

That's way more expensive over long distances and just because you're immortal doesn't mean you don't get bored. In fact, boredom-induced suicide is probably the leading cause of permadeath post-Fall outside certain bioconservative circles.

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>And then there are just the awkward small niggles that bug me. Like, why would anyone ever use pods, especially that giant crab one, when robots do it better and dont take months to grow?

Pods can do things like enjoy eating. They're easier to adapt to (assuming they're shaped like your original body, the crab being an exception here) than synths. Lots of people who can't afford a biomorph see it as the next best thing. For indentures in the service industry pods are a step up in status from synths for the indenture holder. If you're trying to minimize the use of nanotech then pods require way less maintenance.

>And how is slavery a thing if i can just break one ego and then copy it until i have an army of slaves?

Unless you're in some brinker hab you're way less likely to get caught if you're practicing conventional slavery. Also, diversity. If all of you slaves are identical and one of them turns out to be shit at a task then guess what? They're all shit at that task. Then there's Extropian 'slavery' (separate from actual Extropian slavery which is illegal) where the slave entered into a contract which resulted in the situation but did not sign away forking rights.

Also, this exact scenario does happen sometimes.

>is there even an age limit on farcasting
No. You can do bring pets, data and software with you as well.

Jumping off from the Jovian equipment discussion several threads ago: Are there any habs that belong to 20th Century/Early 21st century-style conservatives? Like, a melange of commie-hatin' freedom-lovers straight out of the 80s, people who think the Second Amendment is the most important amendment, people who believed neo-Fundamentalist Islam was the biggest issue pre-fall, good-ole-boy rednecks who didn't go to Mars and insist on driving coal rollers in a future where the standard are electric cars, people who formed anti-government militias, the religious right who believe Jesus and the Holy Spirit got them through the Fall, lolbertarians who didn't take off to Extropia or the Commonwealth, and /pol//Reddit-style alt-right?

>Plus i just don't believe most humans would accept stuff like a machine that kills you and transmits a copy of you over long distances and think of it as transport.

The 90 percent of humanity that thought this way died in the Fall. Those who were willing to egocast did, those who weren't were, as a rule, killed by the TITANs.

ULTIMATES NUMBER ONE

JOVIANS A SHIT

GET BACK TO US WHEN YOU ACTUALLY BEAT THE TITANS AT SOMETHING

>every anarchist habitat in the outer system that somehow keeps functioning via the unbridled reality warping force of creator bias.

Naw, they work because communally-organized non-capitalist microstates are one of the best forms of society in a post-scarcity environment.

They just frequently get rolled over by less competitive, traditionally statist or corporate interests who invest in things like books and guns.

Exhibit: Minervans.

That doesn't explain the LLA or the Jovians and various habs, or the scum barges from people who physically made it off Earth (iirc the Jenkins morph was made when not-the-Jackass-crew got off world) - I'm also willing to bet a solid chunk of Mars really don't think this way.

Speaking of which - where in the splatbooks is the discussion of the fact no one acknowledges cortical stack backups aren't the person, just the copy of the person? I know it's somewhere in the pages, but my PDF viewer hates searching.

Listen, it's like magic or faster than light travel in other settings. Just suspend your disbelief for this one thing because it's the principle that makes the setting work for the most part. There is stream of consciousness, despite the fact that logically there really shouldn't be.

There's also the pre-gen characters heavily implying a lot of people don't like sleeving into 'bots because you get phantom pains - now you can't sleep, can't eat, can't really rest. Some people adjust, others don't.

Pods are a happy compromise, at least.

If I recall, some of the arguments are "who cares? It's my thoughts, personality, and what I know that matters.

In my opinion, I like to think there's a solid chunk of people who only use cortical stacks as the absolute last resort, and we hear about it more often because we're in an organization expected to die horribly several times. For its advanced tech, I don't think cortical stacks are perfect - it won't capture every twist of the nerve and every memory perfectly, and so won't the egobridging/resleeving procedure.

Actually, now that gets me thinking - why isn't there a "escape pod" collar/helmet that, upon detecting severe body damage, decaps the head, dumps life-preserving nanites, nutrient gels, etc., and rockets off to a safe zone? Not as portable as cort stacks, but at least you know it's you, radiation damage from flying in space notwithstanding.

>For its advanced tech, I don't think cortical stacks are perfect - it won't capture every twist of the nerve and every memory perfectly, and so won't the egobridging/resleeving procedure.

While I agree with most of what you said, this is pretty much head canon isn't it? Cortical stacks are one for one memory devices, even if they don't actually preserve stream of consciousness.

Is there a difference, from philosophical, cognitive and continuity-minded standpoints, between putting someone in digital dead storage and cryonically freezing them?
Assuming no damage due to crystal formation and proper one-to-one infomorph coverage, I mean.

Yeah, but biological brains and the way nerves are built aren't easily flash-copied and flash-grown like USB sticks. There's a lot more than a simple file transfer.

You're ignoring the fact that the setting addresses this and says that it IS that simple in EP. They have basically complete understanding of the brain and the hardware to move around perfect copies.

Not really no. Both of them kill the person but preserve an exact copy of the brain.

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Have you ever done an Earth game? If so, what did your players find there?

Well there is alternative variant to guardian swarms but it kills communication beyond signs and voice completely - power armor with installed full surface shock discharge running constantly. You probably still will want at least microbots with additional shockers to guard and repair breaches in armor. Or just have a "got breach go kamikaze" policy.

Adding to Faraday mods - all equipment with installed programming should be running on old hardware preferably with drive space used up to the last byte and no rewriting options. No wi-fi or even laser links to equipment at all only optical cables. Have a couple of caveman class mechanical weapons without any info-accessories as backup.

Jovians actually do travel normally mostly. Egocasting is prohibited for most of the population. Only military, government and security specialist can access it. Even I think diplomatic corpus will probably use physical rides. Much more trouble but it gets the point across.

That's also why their spacefleet is so big.

Oh, I know, I was just more talking about the fact that it wasn't just egocasters who were able to get off Earth during the Fall. I'm willing to bet there's a ton of people who do not egocast for the same reason as Jovians.

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Your body is an interface. Your brain is an interface. The only thing that exists is will.

Well, if we're starting this conversation up again, resleeving and egocasting are kind of simultaneously common and uncommon.

Long-range space travel is expensive and time consuming. If you are involved in a trade or activity which requires quick mobility you're gonna have to either get down with forking, or get over any existential concerns about resleeving - keeping in mind assuming average attributes Resleeving is usually a slightly uncomfortable situation which may require periods of downtime at the end away from your "home" morph. It's almost never fun unless you were "born" with or otherwise develop Adaptability.

Most of the population has only been resleeved once - The Fall. Twice for former indentures possibly, more if you're in a high risk occupation. However, that 0 -> 1 transition is kind of a big deal. So even if you've done it once, you kind of have to deal with the existential dread one way or the other. Since most people do not have the moral stones to condemn themselves to an existential negation or however else they might view being a "copy", they just move on with their lives - and probably tend to deeply resent people who insist they are "dead" or "copies" on multiple levels (not the least of which is it's just plain rude).

Player characters, however, tend to be exceptional people. And using the default Firewall situation (a construct which allows high mobility in the setting and gives a reason for disparate factions to come together in a single group, thus requiring less GM nanny work) tends to mean you need to be able to travel fast. Thus, the mechanics and all the in-setting people with Firewall treat egocasting as perfectly normal, because they have to.

Also, before anybody goes "but a lot of the Jovians haven't resleeved!" on my "most people have only been resleeved once"

Entire population of the Jovian sphere (including all moon/lets not just JR) is listed as about 40 million. Population of Valles-New Shanghai is 37 million. Total population of Titan is about 60 million. Total population on Luna - who have an obvious underclass of Synths is 40 mil.

Scale is important.

Someone else.

You let someone else do it. And if they survive, and come back... you fucking kill them.

>Actually, now that gets me thinking - why isn't there a "escape pod" collar/helmet that, upon detecting severe body damage, decaps the head, dumps life-preserving nanites, nutrient gels, etc., and rockets off to a safe zone? Not as portable as cort stacks, but at least you know it's you, radiation damage from flying in space notwithstanding.

I wouldn't put it past the Minervans to refurbish some Headhunter drones to follow their operatives around as an escape mechanism.

Recovering from a head requires a healing vat, which the Minervans would burn everything within a kilometer of if you even joked it was lying around.

How do the Jovians justify this double standard?

Reminds me of something...

>expecting a bunch of south-americans to give a shit about double standards

HUEHUEHUEHUE

It's deeper than that though. It's not like restricting nukes for military use. Imagine if teleporters got invented and congressmen declared them illegal because they 'work by killing people', but openly used them on a regular basis. People would have questions about why thrse politicians are willing to allegedly die.

It's about sacrifice I imagine. Military personnel are willing to die but they banned it for civilians because suicide is illegal or something. I don't know.

When a war hero does it that seems plausible. When Donald Trump does it, you start asking questions.

"Donald Trump" doesn't. Spies, military, maybe occasional diplomat if situation needs a man right now somewhere far from Jovian moons. Senators are pretty comfy in their apartments and don't need to go beyond Republic territory and for that purpose they have spaceships.

Except that most transhumans favor improved interfaces between the mind and machinery. This is retarded to compare given that the show's transhuman movement was very different from the one in EP.

If a person is legally dead for several minutes, is your soul gone?

No, because you still have brain activity.

What if you go brain dead, and someone uses advanced recussitation methods to restart your body and brain? Is the restored you a soulless husk?

There are vegetables with nothing but a brain stem left who have brain activity.

Pods are cheap, they take longer to make but they're cheaper to make and service.

There's only one major hab where both forking and indenture is legal: Extropia. Even there I'd expect a lot of indenture contracts to forbid unrequested forking (though enforcement would be hard).

In the inner system where most indenture is done, and probably the rest of the system as well, illicit forking is enough to make generally placid inner system citizens riot in the streets. It's a really big deal if discovered, that will probably have people digging deeply enough to inflict Real Death on whoever does it.

Cortical stacks are built to solve a hard problem. [Moderate] is a pretty big deal for inoffensive nanotech.

I had a game like that. I thought it would be sci-fi Dark Souls tier brutal but the GM went easy so I was able to win pretty much every fight easily. I was kind of letdown by how much I didn't die horribly. I had shit like full-size plasma missiles for the SRNs I thought would be coming. I'd like to try something like that again, but I think I'd want nothing but experienced players and I don't think that's really possible.

The Jovian state doesn't blanket ban that stuff, it's just that the bulk of the population hates the tech and won't use it.

Maybe. It comes back if you resuscitate the body though.

>How do the Jovians justify this double standard?

Sacrifice for higher goal, which is protection of the last remaining stand of humanity in Solar System.

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