Zapping a human on ground bases to avoid death penalty or murder
- Thread starter CMDR Darth Vater
- Start date
Trouble is, anything capable of that much destruction would result in no more settlement. Anything that would just target people in the settlement would be defendable against with the same technology that allows you to walk around in unmitigated solar radiation as we do already. Unfortunately this would just further highlight the necessary limitations in the game mechanics where I can't kill someone in a windowed agricultural unit with any weapon that exists within the game - the same weapons that will easily punch through the hull of a 1 kiloton ship.
But it would be fun to watch from a distance. I could pick off any stragglers after I exit my vehicle.
There is a fair gap between the partial pressure of oxygen required to support life and that required to support consciousness. Even in basic suits meant to run low pressure pure oxygen, it wouldn't be a binary on or off thing. Setting the O2 mix to a very low partial pressure equivalent (say sub-4%) would knock almost everyone out in a few breaths, but kill almost no one inside 90 seconds. Raising the O2 partial pressure to 6-7% equivalent will delay death for a protracted period of time, but allow almost no one to regain consciousness.
Since most human feedback mechanisms related to breathing and respiratory discomfort are a response to rising CO2 concentrations, not a lack of oxygen, most people would be unconscious before they knew what was going on. This is why inert gas as a means of execution is seeing such interest; the symptoms of a total lack of oxygen are very subtle and very brief. Those trained to recognized those symptoms might have enough time to get a few shots off or activate an alarm, but if one can hack a closed life support system, jamming communications for a few seconds should be a small matter. Most people would pass out before they knew what was happening.
This is why nitrogen which is the bulk of the air we breathe is considered a hazardous material in the workplace.
Yeah... i certainly can't recreate it now, but it did happen once a while back. Maybe I'm just a flawed narrator on this occasion, but had very distinct memories of zapping someone, avoiding security response, going back to scan the body and it was gone, and only to find the same guard round the corner on their usual patrol.
NPCs vanish on me all the time. It seems half of the ones I kill aren't there to scan when I start making my way through.
Most likely would be a taser of sorts (preferably sidearm). Regulating the electric power delivered is done on weapon side and trivial (it's a current controller, we figured that out near the 90's). The probes would need to pierce the suit, since Faraday Cage effect would negate the taser. No need to fully incapacitate/knock out, if the person is distressed enough to not fight back and be on the ground for a few seconds, that's enough time to go and slap some cuffs or hit them in the back of the head (we do need some realism, but less than 100% is fine too). Of course, this also means that same as with the Energylink Overload: no shields, no effect.
Now that I think about it, how does the Energylink Overload ignores Faraday Cage effect on the suits and still delivers a deadly shock to the person? Are the suits that deprived of conductive materials? Not even a slightly metallic fiber mesh? Maybe we'll see immune NPCs in the future?
And that's the real problem, at least for any of the armored suits (which all security and combat personnel are wearing); they are meant to stop bullets and worse. How do you get taser probes through a ballistic plate? If the probes carry enough energy to penetrate the chest plate on a combat suit, what are those probes going to do if they hit someone in a less armored area (like the neck)?
For soft civilian suits or flight suits, just having puncture holes in them, along with an occupant who can no longer patch their own suit, could easily be a death sentience, depending on the suit specifics and the environment in question.
Judging from aspects of the in-game depiction, raw power. Each discharge is a significant fraction of total suit power reserves and can bridge a meter of high vacuum. We are talking dozens of millions of volts pushing thousands of amps for a fraction of a second. A lineworker's mail Farady suit would struggle to redirect that energy without melting...and enough would pass through the bag of salty water inside to cause serious damage, even without acounting for being wrapped in a suit that was partially turned into plasma and slag.
The biggest problem with the in-game depiction is how mild it looks, probably because of the same censorship that discourages depictions of unconcious characters. Targets of the Energylink on overload should look like LiveLeak videos of what happens when people dance on top of electric trains, grab the overhead line, and burst into flame. If it were a plausible depiction it would be gruesome and no one would be mistaking it for a taser.
NPCs reviving each other following an overload "kill" was a thing during the alpha test but that would have certainly been removed and I've never seen it happen in live. Someone like a guard would sometimes find a tased NPC, run up to them and kneel down while saying something along the lines of "are you alright?" and then the "dead" NPC would get back up in an alerted state. If the NPC were instead downed by a lethal weapon then you'd just get the usual "oh my god he's dead" dialog and the guard immediately went on the hunt. And I don't think this was intended to be left in for the alpha either, since zapping someone still gave you a murder bounty even if revival was possible.
Between scrapped mechanics and the custom "KO" status icon it's pretty clear they had intended for nonlethal takedowns before their legal or marketing departments put the kibosh on it. You could presumably then shoot a KO'd target with a lethal weapon while they're defenseless and that means a higher PEGI rating. And even if the game made KO'd characters invincible, the mere depiction of lethally striking someone helpless is enough AFAIK.
It's the same reason they had to scrap the crossplay they were initially so enthusiastic about between Horizons and Odyssey players. Spaceships blowing each other up = PEGI 7. Spaceships even witnessing humans shooting each other on the ground = PEGI 16. That whole crossplay plan went up in smoke the second legal got wind of it.
Between scrapped mechanics and the custom "KO" status icon it's pretty clear they had intended for nonlethal takedowns before their legal or marketing departments put the kibosh on it. You could presumably then shoot a KO'd target with a lethal weapon while they're defenseless and that means a higher PEGI rating. And even if the game made KO'd characters invincible, the mere depiction of lethally striking someone helpless is enough AFAIK.
It's the same reason they had to scrap the crossplay they were initially so enthusiastic about between Horizons and Odyssey players. Spaceships blowing each other up = PEGI 7. Spaceships even witnessing humans shooting each other on the ground = PEGI 16. That whole crossplay plan went up in smoke the second legal got wind of it.
Thanks... it was a long time ago when i saw this and could well have been during the alpha.
Judging from the looks of it, space suits in Elite are of the mechanical pressure variety (basically tight-fitting Lycra), not the oldschool rubberised balloon sort of thing. A few holes in a mechanical pressure suit won't do much harm, the whole thing is not airtight, anyway, by design.
Spaceship goes BOOM! Spaceship drops an escape pod, a human-in-a-can unable to escape or fight. Another spaceship makes escape pod go BOOM!; that is equivalent to strafing bailed pilots and I'm pretty sure a war crime. PEGI 7and PEGI 16: "This is fine!".
I liked the approach in Thief. Yeah, I think it's gamified, but for a reason. It's become now a playstyle to have nonviolent approach. Usually it involves slower, more inventive gameplay. I think that is the key.
I find these mods for guns in CP2077 that turn a military grade firearm into non lethal kinda silly. It doesn't make much sense. I also think that modding a combat rifle makes the whole inventive gameplay aspect pretty moot. The "blunt" weapon approach I support. Yeah, battle hammer would likely really kill people but that's the tradeoff. Plus, blunt often gets the ragdolls and that is funny to me.
I find these mods for guns in CP2077 that turn a military grade firearm into non lethal kinda silly. It doesn't make much sense. I also think that modding a combat rifle makes the whole inventive gameplay aspect pretty moot. The "blunt" weapon approach I support. Yeah, battle hammer would likely really kill people but that's the tradeoff. Plus, blunt often gets the ragdolls and that is funny to me.
While I get what you're saying, I think in this case because it's simply a container, it's sufficiently disambiguated from the problematic content at hand which is the graphic[1] representation of killing a helpless person, as opposed to the graphic representation of a container (which, through description only) contains a human.
That said, I had exactly this discussion once in the context of "gaming controversy" and why things like that scene in Spec Ops[2], or scenes like this (cw: killing helpless enemies in Commandos 2) don't garner anywhere near the amount of controversy as things like the Mass Effect Fox News "Controversy" (cw: dumb people
) or <insert your choice of controversial GTA topic>.While I definitely agree with your POV here... it got (fairly) put to me that the problem with war crimes and other such things is that it's not a concept people readily grasp or even understand, much less comprehend the enormity of these things. Heck, it's every other day I hear people say "Well, what's it matter if your enemy does it? Aren't war crimes inevitable? Surely you can't rule on 'heat of the moment' actions?"... I definitely don't want to broach those specific topics here, only to use them as examples.
In general, people comprehend the murder of someone walking to their car after late-night shopping.
In general, people don't comprehend the murder of an enemy who is hors de combat and hidden behind a box.
[1] by graphic, I mean "a visualisation of"
[2] While this was controversial, it wasn't anywhere near the magnitude of the latter mentioned ones.
Yeah, I was definitely pointing out the hypocrisy of "It's okay to kill helpless people if you don't see their faces, hear their screams and see the blood". Not only in gaming—Disney and their "bad guy falls to their death off screen" trope is infamous. Also related: blood and guts on screen is OK, but showing too much skin is morally wrong.
"Motiveless killing" - you mean, exactly what gankers do?
Anyone remember the Top Tip from Elite 2, where you took a load of slaves without cargo bay life support and turned them into "animal meat"?
Electrical attacks or zapping is contextual. I feel it tends to be non lethal in games (nonsense, I know, but that's what games are for). But some depict it "more mighty", more intense animations, blue glow, sound and have it as lethal type. Just think of Warhammer Psykers.
Should have been "strange meat".