Transhumanity on the sphere

T2 rounds, in particular, seem like they would be JUST THE MOST ILLEGAL EVER on any ship or station.

 

I'd imagine those are housed inside fairly robust Faraday cages.

 

I wonder if things are a little more relaxed on a Haqq ship, seeing as they seem to prefer to build their space-stations in hollowed out asteroids.

Occasionally a friend and I like to play a modified 'boarding party' game, where any weapon with the 'anti-material' trait is banned.

 

If anything I'd say they'd be less relaxed. Haqq doesn't put such a priority on personal expression and such, they'd prioritise the safety of the hab. But also quite frankly I imagine that both are very tough on those that put the habitat at risk. The Nomad motherships are literally flying cities though, I imagine they're made of tough stuff, well armoured and difficult to put at risk with personal firearms.

 

And massively redundant. Yeah, that room's life support might need a fuse replaced, but there's enough additional capacity that the rooms next to you can cover.

No, I don't mean "that (pressuretight) compartment's life support", I mean that specific room (one of many inside a pressuretight compartment) has an individual life support box. No American-style central heating/air conditioning for the whole house, Japanese style individual room heat/AC.

You do know that the Apollo Lunar Module's skin was made out of aluminum foil, right?

Until you get to the point that space doesn't suffer from the Every Gram Counts rule, space stations are going to be something you could probably put a pencil through with your bare hands.

So, no, I'd expect Haqq to be at least as strict about privately owned AP/T2/whatever ammo as the Nomads.

 

Once you have zero G mining and manufacturing then mass starts becoming less of an issue. Particularly when you have to worry more about hostile action and prolonged exposure to radiation.

Momentum however will start to raise its head.

Circulars probably never stop moving, just coast along at relatively constant velocity with attendant craft matching velocity to join and depart. This explains the static routes.

Motherships a probably similar. Which explains why their movements need to get planned so long in advance.

 

Yup.

The problem is technically engines, though the obscene cost of getting into orbit in the first place (for current tech) does still apply. Even if you cut the cost of getting into orbit by multiple orders of magnitude (say, by using an orbital elevator), if you don't have bigass torchy-torch engines (like a fusion nuclear-thermal rocket) you still need to build low-mass to be able to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.

Because modern rockets get you milli-gee or less acceleration, usually. Yup, I'm talking accelerations measured in centimeters per second. None of the awesome Asimovian or Heinleinian multi-gee accelerations so beloved of 1950s scifi.

 

That's kinda the point though: the things you want "tough" don't need to get anywhere quickly.

You can happily trade acceleration for survivability.

 

The heavier you are, the more reaction mass it takes to move you someplace. While Infinity somewhat sidesteps this with the Vila Boosters, all that really does is transfer the reaction mass requirements from the ship to the booster.

For an orbiting station, however, sure. Build it empty, then pack in several megatonnes of water for radiation shielding and hotel use. Lots of uses for water in space, and lots of water up there.



Survivability is a very relative term in space. An object traveling at 3km/sec packs kinetic energy equal to it's own weight in TNT, and that goes up with the square of the velocity increase. Low Earth Orbit is 11km/sec (and up), nearly 4x faster and therefore 16x the blam. For maximum ouch, you want to be in an opposing orbit, for ~8x faster and therefore 64x the blam. A simple rock traveling at 2000km/s relative packs 400kiltotons of blam per ton of rock.

There are ship designs out there that talk about thirty meters of layered armor and how that's only enough to deal with the fragments of the stuff your laser CIWS chops into little pieces.

 

It is still true that a hollowed out asteroid can be made a lot tougher than a typical space station.

And it's not something you are likely moving around more than once.

 

I think there were mentions of orbital elevators somewhere? That would make the issue of sending stuff up irrelevant, at least the stuff you can't assemble in space.

You can move using the maneuver thrustes in space... It just takes a REALLY long time to walk anywhere that way, since space is so massive. The problem would only be stopping, of course, if the mass/speed grows after that...

Repeat after me: Karavansaries! And now look at Haqquislam's space base during the second web campaign, or the Druze Bayram base on Outrage...

It's dirt cheap (lol, pun intended) to refit an asteroid that was hollowed out by mining operations into a space station. They just are not as glamorous as the ones built from scratch!

 

I always find the discussion of space travel interesting. However original post was about transhumanity. The thing I wonder, is how does the human sphere identify people. In a setting where bodies can be replaced, I don't think biometrics can be used to reliably ID someone. (Even though we have a picture of a Yu Jing soldier performing what looks like a retinal scan) Cubes probably have some sort of crypto-serial number, that might be digital unlikely to replicate, making it difficult to impersonate someone else. But it seems like even if the Cube ID cannot be easily replicated, it would seem to be almost trivially easy to change, just to avoid being identified as yourself. Although individuals without cubes could probably be identified by biometrics (Which might explain the retinal scan picture, if that was a Japanese citizen.)

Any system that relies an a trusted exchange of information, can be corrupted if the trusts can be compromised.

 

In Eclipse Phase, since your mind can be reduced to software in its essence, they used some sort of "barcode" that would show up in physical scanners of a brain, or similarly on non-forgeable (with ease, at least) cryptographic codes. However, compared with the Human Sphere, in EP you have a total population smaller that the Nomad Nation (I'd even bet that smaller than the biggest of the ships...), but on the other hand changing bodies there was as simple as changing your underwear is nowadays.

So first, I would say that the Cubes play a big role in the identification of the people. Also, block chains similar to those used with Bitcoins will be usefull, aswell as a "white list system" instead of a "black list" (you are registered, or you are assumed to be a criminal).
Then, since Aleph is there and knows everything, I'd say she controls who access what by simple conversations, instead of hard passwords like those we use nowadays. So imagine that the "password" to enter your computer is akin to the conversations done in Blade Runner to identify replicants, with questions tailored for each person.

Finally, remember everyone has a Muse... I mean, a Geist or "SIRI descendant". Those can handle the less critical ID requests, with some Augmented Reality overlays.
And routine gubernamental scans are of the retinal type, since 90% of the people can't afford a new body, with certain eyes, registered in the system "legally" (think the iconic YJ image of the Bao checking the eyes of an asiatic citizen of YJ).

 

The RPG book has some interesting info on cubes for Identification and authentification; while there are some regular ways (knowledge based, Item held or biometric), cubes see very little use from what it seems:

Cube Scan: A Cube scan is a form of biometric verifcation which checks the subject’s actual thoughts and personality. This method of authentication requires the VoodooTech of the Combined Army when used on living subjects, although it does see some limited use in the Human Sphere among personalities stored in Cube banks and AIs (i.e., personalities which are stored on quantronic mediums that can be easily accessed).

Thats one of the reason why speculo are so good at their job, thanks to vodoo tech they are able to copy a cube thought pattern they also run on a double cube setup (one for them and one for the "costume")

 

I had forgotten about the Geists from the RPG. I wonder if anyone every does a Geist assassination run. Reminds me of a book i read once. 'Psychohistorical Crisis' (a very dense read) All citizens of the Galactic empire have a nuero device implanted at a young age to augment their cognitive abilities. Its functions include perfect memory recall, as well as basic and advance mathematics abilities, as well as communication, and other computer assistant functions. The main character is accused of treason, and has his device removed and destroyed, effectively rendering him handicapped. He is so reliant on his device, he can't even remember names and faces of close personal friends. He eventually obtains a black market replacement, but laments it will take decades to train it up to levels where he could be a fully functioning member of society again.

That is a really interesting tidbit to learn, I did not know that.

 

In Eclipse Phase, Muses are the same, assigned from birth to be half secretary, half companion, half... everything. In a game were trauma and Sanity loss exists, losing access to your muse is a traumatic event, as well as losing access to the datasphere! Then there's the Ultimates... (think Envoys on Steroids, this guys hunt things that would give an Avatar nightmares).

 

Sure.

But you have to be able to compromise the trusted information. If the ID check is retinal scan plus a wifi "what's your Cube's serial number" ping, with Aleph knowing every single Cube serial#, it's *really hard* to compromise unless you are an Aleph agent. Or a Speculo running dual cubes.

The Eldraeverse basically uses a Cube Scan, but they're high-tech enough to make a Cube Scan (they call it cognometrics) trivially easy. *Everything* there runs off your Cube Scan. House, car, even most of your clothes and accessories! Well, actually, everything there runs off of your Public Key encryption, which is what the Eldraeverse uses instead of a Cube serial number.