malek77

But, how do you know it wasn't future you?

What terrible calamities could possibly drive you to such beardly unkemptitude?

I CAN'T SEE THE PHOTOGRAPHER IN HIS MIRROR SHADES...

Du du DUMMMM

Craig Venter recoded the meaning of a 'codon' to produce artificial/unnatural proteins this year. That's gonna be a big deal when industrialised.

So I'm thinking about games again now my course is nearly over.

A recurrent subject of consideration is what kind of projectile 'propellant' options are there other than exploding chemical powders...specifically, their performance relative to conventional propellants.

How powerful could an air-rifle 'be compared to conventional 5.56? Could an air-rifle ever equivalent in performance to an M16? Think of ratios - double the size? Half the muzzle velocity?

How well do spear-guns perform? It seems like modern rubber compounds could make for Cross-bow equivalent launchers, without the need for the big awkward T shape.

Other suggestions?

For context - imagine a draconian crackdown on Night City. All fire-arms not in Corporate or Police armories are confiscated, a process guided by advanced chemical-sniffing tech. In the ensuing melee, half of Night City's population is wiped out, and the surviving disarmed remainder immediately plot to re-arm, but find they can no longer get conventional bullets...they can get at advanced machine shops though.

What do they try?

I've always been 'troubled' by the militarised-hobo aspect of Edgerunners...

I think of them as travelling 'consultants' who are just very, very hard to arrest, because to do so would unearth such a tangle of alliances and crime that it would embarrass everyone. Better to just bait them into a gunfight and shoot them in self defence.

I want them to be living a high life of golden credit cards, expensive toys and dramatic crashes to Earth...fear of failure & desperation makes them more pliant, the better for their Corporate overlord's will...

Zero-ing, whilst appealing to paranoid Survivalists, is primarily about being an administrative nuisance.

Whatever the bureaucracy is, poor data on an individual hampers that bureaucracy's enforcement mechanisms.

Makes an individual hard to tax, fine, serve notice on, or match to related incident records. Each data point remains in isolation, and a complete pattern can't be adequately created.

A 'Zero' company, able to earn money and have financial power without the burden of taxation is a wonderful boon to its operator, a target for enforcement, and an upraised middle finger to 'the System.'

It makes the most sense in fairly 'light' to 'medium' dystopias, like reality.

...however, when those data-points DO match up, and over time they will, then years of misbehaviour and offence will suddenly land on a single person's head, and suddenly the lack of data means they can't create an alibi to escape. What the data says is true, is true.

If 'bad data' that resembles them is dbase matched onto them, they can become a scapegoat for other zeroes doing similar things.

If they're innocent, to escape what's coming down on them means full and frank disclosure, and then they're on-system, surrounded by a cloud of warnings and alerts to double-check everything they do.

In game terms, a Zero should mostly be fine...and then one day, abruptly cop a firestorm of trouble they aren't entirely responsible for, because right now, loading them up is the most effective way for a constellation of bureaucracies to account for a stack of unknowns.

Spartan/Helot/Barbarian

Elite/Citizen/Immigrant

Agent/Civilian/Zero

...a world with an elaborate but shriveling economic/social model could see a desperate 'enfranchised' Elite societies shedding failed citizens (those no longer able to maintain the charade of wealth), into a world no longer concerned with legacy-corporate-governance systems. Faith-birth/Zeros would then begin to coalesce a new society. The old-legacy world would argue whether to go out and 'harvest' the Zeroes, ignore or destroy them...

Damn.

Get well soon!

Phwooooooaaaarrrrr.... O_O

They are incredible!

That ~$50 figure might be Afghanistan.

Wasn't a functional AK worth about $350 there, an RPG tube about $600?

That was early on in the invasion. No doubt the market has been affected.

And I do believe Nagants were sniping/hunting rifles there...

...man that place sounds like Borderlands some times...

Service life, 100 years, and counting.

LOL.

In a thousand years time, the ancient sacred war relic to be carried only by the most worthy will be...

...Reckon CP2077 will have a scriptable scenario/map builder?

Imagine.

GMing as setting up the environment, the characters, the scripts. PCs join the map as an online game. The GM oversees, filling in gaps, providing interactive chat with in-game characters.

Good grief...

But it's so very real, innit? It's not absolute good vs absolute evil, it's people doing what people do...but at a higher pitch. The conflicts start loaded with more energy, more potential violence. The locals are attuned to it, it's normalised, but at the same time, more traumatic. No matter the hardness of the body, the mind is still vulnerable.

...how do you help a guy like Nat?

Damn.

I think one of the major points to be made in criticizing works of fiction is that though SciFi may be projecting a future it is informed by the present.

...

If the subject matter made you uneasy, well it never hurt to be challenged by something or the other.

As for "not being possible".... this IS still a cyberpunk game and discussion board right?

AMEN BROTHER. PREACH IT.

I finally got to see it!

Looked fantastic. I mean...that's your ripper-doc right there. That's your robot factory right there. Krugers hardware looks sooooo real. And he had a Katana. Squee!

The weapons in this were pretty extreme. That SAM launcher was...out there. The Chemrail was glorious. It rolled D10's, I'm sure. It was not at all what I was expecting.

You can say the plot was...somewhat blunt. And it would be valid to say so. Really, it reminded me enormously of our CP games. Evil megacorporation in the sky, escalating awesome weapons, hacking...

...except, it, like, finished with an ending and stuff.

I've wanted to see a proper torus habitat since I was 6 and got hold of that "what the future will look like" book in school. This was it. And it was executed beautifully.

Sigh.

Now all we need to do is get Game-of-Thrones style plot sophistication together with the Blomkampf look...and then...we shall conquer all...

If you're counting Greenpeace's very own warship as a navy

1. Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace are not on good terms - Greenpeace is explicitly a non-violent 'satyagraha' type 'passive resistance' type organisation. Sea Shepherd split away over the use of direct action, as it saw that as more effective.

Which, frankly, would be the general opinion of this board.

tie windsor knots in their boxers if you call them mercenaries instead of "Private Security Contractors"

2. Mercenaries carry out direct action combat for payment. Security contractors secure a subject for payment, against violence.

The first is widely illegal and causes extreme distress to the UN, Western nations wanting to look moral, and is extremely offensive to anybody those Merc's are being used against. The RUF was terribly upset about driven back into the jungle. There were all those people left with right arms in the south that they couldn't get at.

Blackwater did try out Greystone though. It used to be direct-action, now it's aviation services. Huh. Interesting...

http://www.greystone-ltd.com/about.html

As the Greenpeace fleet have legally been declared pirates in multiple countries I'm just waiting for some Armed Naval vessel to light up the Sea Shepard group when they don't heave to and permit boarding.

3. Sea Shepherd operations in the southern pacific/antarctic ocean type area are often near New Zealand and Australian Navy operations.

I doubt any Australian Navy ship will 'light up' Sea Shepherd.

I think it significantly more likely that, assuming the whaling case goes against the Japanese whalers (which, given the paucity of research, is likely), that further Japanese whaling will result in the boarding and 'escort' of Japanese whalers out of Australian waters by the Australian Navy.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-28/expe...science/4786566

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-10/aust...l-court/4810178

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/07...ntific-research

Lethal take can only make sense if we have a question that needs to be answered... a meaningful question," Professor Mangel said.

Australia is arguing Japan's practice of catching and killing nearly 1,000 whales a year for research disguises commercial whaling and contravenes international law.

Japan and Australia have both agreed to be bound by court's verdict and activists are hoping for a ruling against Tokyo that they believe will put an end to whaling in the Southern Ocean."

The validity of Japanese 'scientific' whaling is being challenged in the Hague.

If however the Sea Shepherds escalate matters by boarding and seizing a Japanese vessel the results would doubtless prove to be extremely ugly.

4. Sea Shepherd doesn't want to board. Sea Shepherd wants to make the whaling totally un-viable. Their ability to track, pursue, divide up the whalers and deflect them from migrating pods is only increasing. Support for Sea-Shepherd is wide spread and cashed up.

Sea Shepherd can operate from NZ and Australia, the Japanese cannot - they'll get mobbed by protestors, and Sea Shepherd will just lurk outside port and track them with ease.

The Whalers have to plan to dodge Sea Shepherd, and with the new ships, that's getting dramatically harder.

http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php/articl...ry-with-gojira-

And seriously.

Look at that hull.

As if you don't want one.

Sea Shepherd's Gojira.

I've only just seen something along the lines of a refillable gas 'cartridge' to put behind BB's or paintball, that is fired by a pin. I quite like this idea...versatile, and as Stray has been trying to do, derates from 'full lethal' to something a bit more responsible.

((I have occasionally pondered a CP game where there were no trad fire-arms...all knives and compressed gas...))

I'm sure you're all familiar with the Nerf Maverick?

I keep imagining something like that with Taser darts in it. That gas cart' thing would be perfect.

And you could have paint loads for training/practice/public art purposes.

Nano - This is a sign that your GM is really, really upset with you...

BAHAHAHahaha LOL

They taste horrible, according to my brother.

LOOOOL

...wow.

I just came here to laugh. And say that the paintball turret idea is great.

And there's this. For that 'Hero' effect.

And for a closer look :

http://www.itsbetterupthere.com/site/

A Russian DNI on a Kawasaki frame so he can haul Polonium powered exo-portable railguns...on a space station that looks overtly like a Syd Mead design...

...this is gonna melt my brain...finally...someone is doing it RIGHT.

. . .

*facepalm*

DUUUDE! That Rocks!

That has just made my day! *tear*

...I need a printer...

So video of you doing lines of synthcoke off a comely stripper's behind while blasting metal and doing kegstands from a barrel of SMASH! at 3 am is about the only evidence that we'll accept. The gauntlet has been thrown down.

I'll see what I can arrange.

...could I roll dice on her back?

I...

Okay, I'm taking notes, just in case. And thanks for the kind thoughts.

But seriously. I am not married.

I'm sitting here in my bachelor pad surrounded by dice and Matchbox cars and posting on VftE.

If I were married, I suspect I might be otherwise distracted.

So, do you give your players more input based on whether or not they have cybernetics...

YES YES HELL YES - hammer it home. Give them beautiful visions - imagine IR+UV vision at sunset? What can they hear with wide-band audio? Imagine taking a depth-map scan of a surface by running your fingers over it?

Imagine having the memory co-processor to record all this with 1:1 sensor-point precision and perfect recall?

...You do need to think about complex light a lot though.

Think : Would rainbows look different?

NOOO no no no NOOOOO no. No.

Reports of my wedding are greatly exaggerated and rely entirely on falsified intelligence reports.

There is no wedding, wife, Russian harem or girlfriend.

I am still the nihilistic pro-Transhuman wannabe cyborg with a machine gun fetish you're used to.

It was a friend's wedding I was attending. Reputation damaging photos were taken that may falsely imply either alcohol consumption or a wedded state. Both are false.

No, the real story of what's going on is far less noble & I probably need some brotherly advice from Hanns, but probably wouldn't follow it anyway.

...

They are so beautiful.

Oh I LOVE them! I don't know what happened, whether form or function came first, but that it is one awesome shape.

Seriously. This is the kind of thing that should click onto a Full-Borg's wrist mounted picatinny rail.