/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

Apparently it's some kind of dual stage shit - the round is initially fired by a chemical propellant like a normal bullet then stepped up by a magnetic rail.

Do any of you have personal habs/ships for your characters? If so, what are they called?

There really aren't, there are seekers for every situation, stun, concussion, AP, EMP, HE, you name a target and there's a seeker for it.
To be fair though, I based the statement on my personal experience. We had a couple of combat morphs with Plasma Rifles and all the Armor in the world and everytime they got shreded in combat my Nerdbot steped up to the scene and covered all passageways in overload and explosive AP rounds, at least forcing a stalemate.

All entries of H-rep blog in one file.

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>covered all passageways
This is why the seekers won. In more open environments with fewer corners bullets do better.

Seekers have better ranges tho.

Barely, and with pitiful rates of fire

Actually, minimissiles have ranges comparable to sniper rifles and thus far outclassing other kinetic weapons.

Long range for a minimissile: 301-1000 meters
Long range for a rail machinegun: 601-1500 meters

Is it just my timezone or have these threads been really fucking slow lately?

Nah, we had a big uproar for a couple of threads though, only some of which was shit posting and have died back down for now.

It's from Cyberpunk 2020, don't remember which gun it is, but i remember the image.

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In an open enviroment the dude with th seekers shoots from behind cover and you can't return fire because your silly slugs and lasers don't go around corners.
Seekers are even more OP in open enviroments.

Keep in mind that railgun rounds can't be smartrounds. That is considerable disadvantage.

>Keep in mind that railgun rounds can't be smartrounds. That is considerable disadvantage.
Can't you just fire a customized missile out of a railgun and call it a smartround?

So a Seeker? A coilgun-assisted gyrojet.

Nope, railguns only fire normal and AP dumb rounds. I imagine that the current and acceleration are pretty brutal on more complicated things.

I'm not the only one who pictures regular minimissiles as 40mm and the smaller micromissiles as 25mm, right?

Well yeah 40mm is probably in the upper limit for infantry weapons before they get too cumbersome for the average humanoid soldier

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How effective would a flat Jovian waifu be in combat if I wanted to stay away from tech as much as possible

I mean, with full auto and some specs (or a helmet) to run the smart link (or just stick a laser on it) just shooting people with a gun is pretty good for anything - but you'll never be as good a combat monster unless you're willing to cram yourself with either chrome or drugs. Multiple levels of Speed is where it's at in a firefight.

And if you want to go real low tech you're pretty boned - subdual is great but otherwise melee is for people with multiple limbs or fuckhueg roided morphs.

It should be noted, melee has certain advantages in stealth. There's no defense if surprised, so a wasp knife full of something nasty will go a long way - but there's not really a good coup de grace rule, so you need a follow up. If you don't mind getting assists, somebody in a brawl with eelware or shock gloves can pave the way for other combatants.

If you want to be stealthy you HAVE to jam their mesh inserts, otherwise it doesn't really matter how much sound you make.

Stealth is a lot easier when your morph is chameleon coated and has no radar return though

Well, not everyone is plugged into a tacnet all the time. If you dope them full of Twitch or BTX you can take the fight right out of them, not everybody necessarily wants to autodial their local 911 equivalent either. You can take AIs by surprise as much as people if you're worried about a Muse (but for the sake of Sanity, most mookly NPCs do not need their muses accounted for - because no GM should have to roll twice for each person in a scene)

Now, with THAT said, jamming is absolutely a very useful thing and should be something somebody in your team routinely engages in. Yet another reason why Firearms are the best.

That may be the most ill-conceived APDS art I've ever seen. You need two contact bands.

Stacking initiative and speed can be done with drugs, or the psychic virus if you don't mind being an exsurgent in human skin

Stacking armor is important and any character can do it. Just take smart skin, second skin, heavy body armor, a helmet and some armor mods.

Get a high chance to hit and a (specialization) in your favorite weapon. Take ambidextrous and use two pistols, or two SMGs if you can get away with it. Load them with hollow points. Fire two bursts with each for four bursts per speed phase, or one full auto burst with each for two full auto bursts per speed phase. Remember to use your smartlink and quick action to aim for a free +20 to hit with every shot. A better chance to hit means you can spend the bonus dice from burst fire on damage instead of accuracy.

Seekers aren't competitive with kinetic weapons for raw damage output, UNLESS you're willing to cart around the full size ones. They do have some great utility options.

Take lots of moxie. Know how to use it.

Actually wait no, has it right. Replace the smartlink with the laser sight.

Melee is no good because it's inferior to guns on too many levels. It does less damage, gets fewer attacks per turn, gets fewer positive modifiers to hit and is twice as easy to dodge. Any one of those could be compensated for and routed around, but together they mean that even if you don't want to make a min/maxed character you'll still be disappointed.

Even if you have to go somewhere with restrictive weapon laws you're still better off not trusting melee weapons. Better to get caught with illegal firearms than to get shot to pieces by law enforcement because they had you massively outgunned.

The exception is like said, shock weapons are totally broken against biomorphs (although useless against synths).

So long as they have working mesh inserts, they, or their muse, will call someone fast. Anyone worth killing has friends.

You can try jamming, but anyone smart has an AI watching for that, and it's pretty hard to hide a screaming radio.

The best way to stealth kill someone is to Prisoner Hood them, which is melee only. The second best way is to deal enough damage with a single blow that the mesh inserts aren't working, but that's hard to do quietly.

>Load them with hollow points.

Biters are better, though a little more expensive. I guess they're smart matter though.

>Seekers aren't competitive with kinetic weapons for raw damage output
They are at long range and against clustered targets. The SMG trick sucks ass beyond several dozen meters. That's good enough for many situations, but not all.

Swarmanoids are decent melee characters. They deal pretty good damage, and are resisted by half fray like firearms. They still have a worse action economy and it's hard to upgrade them with speed. That's not very relevant for a a Jovian, but being a swarm of robo-wasps which inject liquid thermite is pretty dangerous.

>Swarmanoids

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Buy a used cargo/passenger spaceship with fusion drive and take a lot of Hardware skills. Buy some shitty drones and good tools. Cut away all the unneeded blocks - cargo holds, passenger cabins, etc. Remake them into laser cannons, gauss cannons and missile launchers. Well, and missiles.

Fuel for missiles can be made out of metallic hydrogen. Its containers scale pretty good.

Kill everyone who bitches about your combat abilities.

Help I still can't fathom post-scarcity and it's driving me to a midlife crisis.

It's not literally post-scarcity.

Very effective. You just shoot her in her legs when the TITAN death machine is chasing you guys, so you get some extra distance to put between you and that horrid thing as it begins to dismantle your Jovian meatshield.

She's a filthy catholic mexicunt anyway, she doesn't count as real people.

Why do you have to shoot her? You can run twice as fast anyway

As long as she keeps running along, the TITAN death machine will move too.

If I stop her from moving, the TITAN death machine will stop moving in order to dismantle her.

That doesn't help much.

Neither does your vague and unspecific plea for help. What exactly is your problem with it?

Yeah but you could just let the death machine stop her

I can't really understand how ideas are worth more than physical items, and even then they're only worth more intangibly. I honestly don't know how society functions without a pricetag on everything.

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Ideas are not worth more than material things. Detailed implementation of an idea, with numbers put on all the stages and details, that can be used by any retard capable to read - this thing costs more than raw materials in most places.

Because if worst comes to worst you always can move to Oort cloud and after a couple of years get your new hab done by drones and nannies. Well unless someone will shoot you there. Shit happens.

The price of a product can be broken down, roughly, into four constituents: materials, design, manufacturing, and transportation.

There are costs involved in every step of bringing a product to existence. Some of these have to do with the maintenance of equipment and such, but a substantial portion of it is just compensating the people involved in the steps. In the case of an iPhone, you've got the Congolese miners procuring the metals for the electronics, the Indian code monkeys writing the OS, the Chinese kids who put the thing together, and the fifteen different people in the transportation business who get them from a fatctory in Beijing to an Apple Store in Oregon. They'd all like to get paid. There's also a little that gets added on top of the actual expenses at every step because somebody is trying to turn a profit; that's capitalism.

Now fast forward to the 22nd century. Everything is automated. That iEcto in your hand was made in a fabricator in your habitat, out of materials mined by drones. The material and manufacturing expenses are negligible, and there are no transportation costs because the item was made on-site. The only thing of real value attached to it is immaterial: somebody came up with the concept, wrote the code, and compiled the instructions for the fabber to make it.

That's how ideas are worth more than physical items.

You may, if you're not a grubby innersys corp shill committed to preserving your rapidly antiquating resource allocation system at all costs, come to the conclusion that there's really no point in doing commerce with dimes and bottlecaps where resources and manufacturing is concerned, and instead make the maintenance of the means of production and resource procurement a community responsibility. And, taking it further, you may decide to stop charging people for the work you put in your code or dragon dildo blueprint since you don't need to receive compensation anymore to survive.

Another sparkling example of anarchist tactics, everyone

This is probably the clearest and most concise explanation for the New Economy I've ever read.

>I honestly don't know how society functions without a pricetag on everything.
That's just it. It's not a society as you know it. In the world you know nations trade finished goods with each other. In EP, there's extremely little labor exchange between habitats unless they're exceptionally near each other, and what labor is exchanged is mostly knowledge work. If you want to find a price tag that applies across the solar system, look at raw resource delivery, iceteroids and such. Even then though, there's probably more than one way of paying.

Why is this the case? Many will say it's post-scarcity. That's not it though. Scarcity still exists, even if it is greatly reduced in many categories. The problem is shipping. Shipping is really expensive. Think age of sail trade between India and Britain, except a huge part of humanity is in nations of a few hundred to a few thousand people as isolated from everyone else as Britain was from India. This situation would not even be possible without the enabling industrial technologies that allow factories to be scaled down to the size of a large nightstand.

Imagine you're living in a tin can habitat outside the dominion of a major power. You, your family, and a few other families you're friendly with have your own can. The can has a CM, a self-contained life support system, and either a big solar array or a fusion power generator. Every family in the can has a maker. You have enough water, biomatter, and industrial materials to make what you need. Between the dozen or so people aboard and the expert systems available to them, you have the skills to maintain your equipment and produce new tools. What's to stop you from disconnecting your can and floating off into space? Not much. Eventually you may need new deuterium or advice from some neighbors, but the primary things keeping you here are the social structure of community in the greater habitat and the need for mutual defense. (continued)

(continued)
These dozen or so people are, for economic and industrial purposes, their own sovereign nation, in many ways less dependent on the outside world than modern nations.

What are these people interested in trading then? Certainly there is some trade of raw material, but most trade (using the term trade loosely here, as software piracy is quite common) is of entertainment (both digital and interpersonal) and technological ideas and designs which work better or more efficiently. If you scale up a bit then sociological ideas may also become a major trade item. When trading with other independent communities, the needs of those involved are the primary driver of pricing.

Now of course not everyone lives in such small communities. It could be a hundred interconnected people, or a thousand, or millions. In the larger groups you'll see more standardized internal pricing models for whatever form of economy they practice.

Not everyone lives in independent communities either. In communities controlled by outside powers there may be enforcement of certain kinds of pricing.

Please note that I am not specifically addressing the new economy here. For now I will just say that there is pricing of a sort within reputation networks, even when people are frequently getting the results of labor for free.

tl;dr, it's like a medieval village in space.

Kinda, but medieval villages typically couldn't fabricate specialized tools, high quality clothing, or anything else like that. One of the huge differences is that potential quality of life doesn't scale with community size the way it used to.

>heterosexual reproduction
>submarine

I'm reasonably convinced that someone, somewhere would indeed fuck a submarine if it was anatomically/structurally possible.

I'm pretty sure that could be said of anything.

Through dick, unity.

Nanomachines, son.

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Should I post more shitty space guns, or do we want to try and talk about something else?

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>shit phase

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Alright, I'll try to inject some actual discussion here - even on the part of seekers. Seeing something on the forums, I'm now interested in concepts of a "stealthed" seeker, and how one might pull that off. Could you significantly reduce the range by arming them with cold gas propellants? Would it be better to make them have poor radar profiles and be harder to sense coming, fuck vision and sound? could you make them quiet? People with more engineering and materials knowledge than me might be able to answer.

Hell, could you turn it into a smart ammo type, a "stealthed" round which is hard to detect on sensors in flight?

Sounds retarded

We're posting guns now. Next thread is for Jovians and the one after that is for debating spaceship crews.

Wouldn't it be smarter to set up a "trap" with regular seekers and put a (land)mine in the only way out?

>Next thread is for Jovians
Jovians don't deserve their own thread

Jovians can make their own /epg/ over on Pedrochan.

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I don't think cold gas propellants would actually be stealthy in this case. They'd still make a lot of noise as the gas released.

The best way to make a stealth seeker would probably to tune the coil to fire aerodynamic subsonic grenades. Basically a very quiet grenade launcher.

I don't think beating radar is all that important for a projectile that small.

You could replace the ramjet with a propeller to reduce the heat signature, but at that point it's not really a seeker anymore.

Alright, so here's another question for the thread about seekers. So obviously, seekers can do all the detonation methods as a grenade; airburst, remote, impact and timer. And with Smart Ammo, you can make them homing based on a smartlink picture, laser guided or proximity detonating.

But, do you think mechanically there's enough distinction for traditional guidance mechanisms in Seekers, such as Radar, Infrared or ARM? Is that too granular and nitpicky, or does it work with Seekers getting an added smart ammo effect? Should more advanced guidance be restricted to standard missiles or larger (the inevitable vehicle-based missiles we may see in space combat)?

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Don't forget that seekers come with a smart ammo option, so they're all homing or laser guided, or whatever.

A radar guided seeker would be a little tricky. I'm not sure if a good enough radar transceiver can be fit in a mini- or micro- missile. Those things must already be very packed. A semi-active radar homing seeker would be easy, but would basically use the same rules as a laser guided seeker, save for the wavelength of the laser. Could be useful if you want a laser guided weapon which isn't detected by standard Enhanced Vision.

Infrared seeking is basically the same as a smartlinked homing seeker, except that it looks in a different wavelength, which means what camo works against it changes. It'd see right through an active camo coating, but just couldn't spot a cold-blooded morph well at all. Considering how much heat a transhuman with a full load of gear is probably putting out it should work well.

An ARM is kind of niche, but is a good way to punish active radar, T ray emitters, or X ray vision and such. There's a lot of powerful sensors which are active. Probably not as useful at an infantry scale, as you're probably going to need to point the missile at the target anyway.

I mean, Smart Ammo is pretty sophisticated, a homing round literally is able know what it's fired at via smartlink and direct itself to that target mid-flight - Proxy and Zero are similar just what they do with the smartlink picture is different. And this can fit in something the size of a bullet - so if "Radar" was it's own smart ammo type it could probably fit though it's range could be limited by the sensor range of the seeker as a gear item (which I'd have to double check on the chart, but mesh insert sized radios have like 500 meters of range in the open).

I don't think a mesh insert radio is a good measure for the radar used in a radar seeker, it generally needs to be a stronger signal.

That said, it would probably work, because I'm stupid and didn't think about how long the signal would need to be sustained. Even tiny EP batteries should be able to give enough juice to run it for the half second it spends in flight.

Yeah, I was mostly using it as like, a point of comparison. IIRC Mesh Inserts are "micro" gear, which is just above, y'know, nanotech radios and it still has a decent range, the seeker missile itself might be a step or two larger - I just haven't checked the scale. Sensor and Comms range is roughly the same for gear based on that table.

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Reminds me of this.

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I'm running low on spaceguns to post - not enough people are yelling about how retarded they are.