Or Etienne Dorn's Special Recipe.
Zapping a human on ground bases to avoid death penalty or murder
- Thread starter CMDR Darth Vater
- Start date
We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write '****' on their airplanes because it's 'obscene'.
Without getting too far into the debate about how hypocritical societal mores are, or how readily people dismiss pervasive systemic issues while habitually indulging in gross moral panic over far less consequential individual ones, the solution for games seems clear...just target a higher age rating, or refrain from submitting them to ratings associations. Not having an age rating, or having one of the highest ones, would doom a game when games where sold on shelves in toy stores, but that's never been the case with Elite: Dangerous. The game was mostly sold on Frontier's own store, via Steam, or via console services, none of which prohibit PEGI 18 or ESRB Mature or AO titles. The PC platforms don't even require any rating.
I mean, who is not going to buy this game because of a PEGI rating? Granted, targeting higher age ratings probably isn't going to increase sales either, but it would certainly allow for more narrative and descriptive flexibility, without mandating needlessly gratuitous depictions of anything.
That's a possibility, but even those still would still need to be air tight in this setting as protecting from a vacuum isn't their only job. There are plenty of examples of even tenuous atmospheres one would not want to be exposed to wearing only a glorified wetsuit and I'm pretty sure these suits were eventually supposed to be used for much thicker and more hostile atmosphere types.
We still have the armored components to contend with too. A dart that could penetrate a trauma plate isn't going to leave pin holes if it hits an unarmored section, but that's less a matter of damage to the suit than whoever is inside it.
Without getting too far into the debate about how hypocritical societal mores are, or how readily people dismiss pervasive systemic issues while habitually indulging in gross moral panic over far less consequential individual ones, the solution for games seems clear...just target a higher age rating, or refrain from submitting them to ratings associations. Not having an age rating, or having one of the highest ones, would doom a game when games where sold on shelves in toy stores, but that's never been the case with Elite: Dangerous. The game was mostly sold on Frontier's own store, via Steam, or via console services, none of which prohibit PEGI 18 or ESRB Mature or AO titles. The PC platforms don't even require any rating.
I mean, who is not going to buy this game because of a PEGI rating? Granted, targeting higher age ratings probably isn't going to increase sales either, but it would certainly allow for more narrative and descriptive flexibility, without mandating needlessly gratuitous depictions of anything.
That's a possibility, but even those still would still need to be air tight in this setting as protecting from a vacuum isn't their only job. There are plenty of examples of even tenuous atmospheres one would not want to be exposed to wearing only a glorified wetsuit and I'm pretty sure these suits were eventually supposed to be used for much thicker and more hostile atmosphere types.
We still have the armored components to contend with too. A dart that could penetrate a trauma plate isn't going to leave pin holes if it hits an unarmored section, but that's less a matter of damage to the suit than whoever is inside it.
Fallout 3?
Nah, that was Live Animals that turned into animal meat.
Slaves turned into fertilizer
Thief 2 was pretty cruel—you could knock an NPC unconcious, then throw them into water where they would slowly drown. PEGI 18, too, accordingly.
Exactly what PvE settlement looters do.
Exactly what I did yesterday. Took a power restoration mission, arrived to the site, a bunch of scavengers present and an intense firefight broke out. Eliminated them, turned the power on, lifted everything not nailed down—you know, the SOP. Hopped into my Scorpion, saw a red square—one of the scavs escaped the carnage and managed to not notice me frolicking around the place with abandon. Grabbed my Executioner, hopped out of the SRV and onto the roof of some structure. Took aim, killed the last scav while they were squatting in front of an open container—back turned to me, completely unaware and powerless to do anything.
I had no motive to do it, my work was done. I could have just left the settlement an leave them be. Or at least not shot them in the back while they were completely unaware. Still I murdered them in cold blood just because they were there and I could.
There is a number of game now made for adults. They could care about some more income from minors buying them (or their parents) but ultimately I think if you make an adult game you don't mind your rating being 18+. For your target audience it even might be a quality sign (no cuddly teddybears, no guns shooting stars and similar nollocks). Today your adult audience is sizeable enough to support that and that's because the kids who played once Mario are now adults who still play - and they want mature stuff.
When I look at ED it doens't particularly strike me as an "adult game". It's an arcadic space sim with lore elements. It's interactions with believable (or not so believable) humanoid characters is basically the only immediate impact on morality, violence depiction and maturity. There is no sex, there is no romance, there is no personal story.
(I still don't know what they meant with "personal narration" - I mean, I kinda do, but I disagree to interprete their petty grind and progress system as narration. It is anything but.)
Mature games deal with interactions, have multi-branched stries with grey morality. You might regret your choices later. You don't get to regret anything in a spaceship simulator.
Yeah you can have feet now, but there is no character, no entity to those feet - only your personal headcanon. There is no flavour, no texture to it and thus it's inherently neutral.
FD's way to tell story is fairly unexplored and stays fairly vague.
That's why I think they made it lower age - it's not a really "mature" game, it's a setting for teens can navigate around imo.
Did you get any bounty for killing criminals, or even a sense of satisfying justice by ridding a settlement of the scourge of scavengers?
Gankers get none of these things. They prey on the innocent for out-of-universe shizzles and giggles, getting joy from just being annoying people. That's motiveless killing in-game.
But yes, if you're just exercising your trigger finger, that's comparable. Less irritating though
I've definitely regretted some of my choices!!! Doing pallet defence now I wish I'd enchanted my gun with fast reload instead of increased magazine size.
For bounty hunting it would be a great option if tied with being able to drag them to a hibernation pod and turn them in for extra credits.
Did get a small bounty voucher. But no sense of satisfaction of bringing justice. What justice, if ultimately the scavs are there for the same reason I am--I just have a legal justification to be there and a plausible deniability for looting the place ("How should I know where all your ionized gas went, the place was swarming with scavengers!"). When I was driving back to my ship I thought to myself "OK, that was a good shot, alright, but why?" (yes, I know, just an NPC that despawns as soon as I jump to supercruise, but still--why?).
I'd argue that "Haha, commander ship goes BOOM!" is at least more honest and straightforward motivation than all the rationalizations and moral voodoo for massacring scavengers or participating in conflict zones. At least I can go "Haha, Phantom faster than meta FDL!" if the ganker tries to blow me up, poor NPC-s don't even have that luxury.
Kevlar (example), a synthetic fabric weave, stops bullets, but not needles and still get sliced clean by blades. Just because something stops bullets or explosive impact that doesn't make it impervious to everything. Each material for defense is designed for one use, and will still have drawbacks.
Taser probes are like needles (same thing as the real taser pistol ones). Needles are able to impart a lot of pressure due to the minimal surface area, so they will perforate any weave/fabric easily, but also will still be stopped easily by friction with the skin (or just by mechanical feature on the needle itself). Hitting a limb, trunk, or a softer part like a neck would have about the same effect in terms of mechanic impact. Only the effect of the electrical shock on the area can be a problem, like hitting a nerve on the spine would be dangerous. Taser training materials probably expand better on this (hopefully, but
And even in the case there is some breach on the suit, we more likely carry patches for that.
Actual ballistic plate (metallic and whole) would be unwieldy, but if the suit has patches with it over vitals, then these could stop the taser needles, but only these parts. And designing small hit spots on a surface to take less damage is a nightmare (visual feedback, coding hitzones, etc), so there isn't value in making it so, and thus it's easier to either write the material as bullet/impact/cut resistant but not perforation, or write it as resistant to all.
The suit doesn't instantly evaporate, so that interpretation is bogus. Even if the Energylink reaches the high voltage necessary to bridge vacuum, that doesn't mean it will deliver that high of a current. On the contrary, in order to increase the voltage enough to bridge vacuum, the current will end up being small and will be discharged fast (total energy needs to be conserved, and the suit doesn't have enough energy to cause that much of a reaction).
The point I raised is that the suit has so little conductivity to the point a shock to the suit is mostly transfered to the skin. I expected some meshes and other things to cause otherwise, but since the overload works than that is not the case.
A trauma plate stops knives, needles, and pointy sticks even more readily than it does bullets and fragments. The combat suits in this game are covered in armored plates. I don't know what they're supposed to be made of, but I doubt it's Kevlar or any other fabric a taser probe is going to slip through. Given that a major use of these suits is scrambling over rough terrain on high-g worlds I would also expect cut and puncture resistance to take priority over ballistic resistance.
Unless they want to make shot placement actually matter, any hypothetical taser firing probes is going to need to penetrate armor plate and if it's got the energy to penetrate these plates, it's probably got the energy to blow big meaty chunks out of the less armored gaps.
Flight suits and unarmored civilians is where the credible utility of a traditional taser-like weapon ends, I think. All the others should stop non-lethal probes cold.
A significant portion of it probably should, based on the energy in each discharge.
I think you are significantly underestimating the energy of these discharges. Hell, even my initial estimation, without the benefit of the game at my fingertips, was almost an order of magnitude low.
Without any mods, the Energylink discharge uses 42% of a flight suit's battery and this suit has a 7MJ (it says MW, but that makes no sense and the game has several other areas where watts are used when they clearly mean joules) capacity. That means each discharge is about three megajoules. Even if the tool is rather inefficient (as the reduced tool energy use mod would imply), this is an enormous amount of energy to deliver in a short pulse. I'm going to play it safe and assume one MJ makes it to the target. This is five times the energy of a 30mm GAU-8 rotary cannon projectile.
Even without those in-game figures, we know the tool needed to be able to kill someone through any suit in the game after passing through a meter of vacuum...which doesn't leave all that much to interpretation...it had to be a crapton of energy. It's just a bigger crapton than I thought.
The depiction of what that amount of energy would do is lacking, probably for technical (performance) and censorship (rated NC-17 for flash fried mists of gore and giblets accompanied by a chorus of Wilhelm screams and the lamentations of the women) reasons. Gameplay wise, dead is dead, so it doesn't matter all that much.
And my point is still that there are likely so many amperes in a jolt, even at the high voltage required to bridge a vacuum, that a suit with significant conductive layers would still reach it's current carrying limit, overheat, and fail catastrophically. Even without any electrical energy making it to the wearer, the exploding suit means a world of hurt.
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Of course it also gives the player a "silent" way of killing without gating it behind the silencing mods..
i really like how put silent in quotes, cause i clearly remember they make a lot of noise in the short timeframe between the zap and the body hitting the floor.
i really like how put silent in quotes, cause i clearly remember they make a lot of noise in the short timeframe between the zap and the body hitting the floor.
Incidentally, i was testing the "rousing " stuff, which i couldn't replicate.... but i found security to be much less...um.. responsive?
In testing, twice i zapped a guard in a patrol path of another, then ran off 100-200m to observe.
Patrols ran to the body, looked at it, then resumed patrol without raising an alarm. When i closed distance they were white on radar (so not alerted) and just ignored the body from that point.
I then went into a building with my unsilenced plasma pistol... very casually killed the occupants... eventually a guard ran in to the building, i stayed close but out of sight. They then tried to raise an alarm but i killed them first.
It seems raising an alarm is a function of player proximity at the time the body is discovered? That and, although i knew this for a while, silence is far from mandatory when preventing alarms.
But it does feel...i dunno... easier?
This thread makes me wish we had an electrical grenade option. A bit like the shield grenade one, only its zaps everyone inside the shield bubble with lightning.
That would be neat. FDev seems to have fixed the auto-launch for the Imperial cutter (until the next update, at least) so a zappy grenade should be easy to make for us.
That would be neat. FDev seems to have fixed the auto-launch for the Imperial cutter (until the next update, at least) so a zappy grenade should be easy to make for us.
I think they need to see the body and the player at the same time in order to actually go hostile - or at the very least, they have to see the person die.
I've sniped people with an executioner before and another NPC has seen the body fall and immediately turned hostile/red (and stayed that way permanently) but didn't actually try to raise the alarm until they actually saw me.
If they're caught in the blast from an explosion but not killed, they'll turn hostile and start calling in the alarm regardless of whether they actually made your position or not.
Personally I'm of the opinion that discovering a body should be a raise-the-alarms moment regardless of whether they know who's responsible or not, similar to how starting the reactor shutdown or opening a sample container will sound the alarms, but personnel won't be hostile if you trigger the alarm then immediately leave the room without being seen - it just puts the entire base on alert.
Then again I also think "hearing gunfire while already alerted" should get them calling in that there's an active shooter on the base too. It's silly that I can just twin-rocket my way around a settlement without anyone raising the alarm despite the constant explosions because I'm standing on the other side of a building blowing people up as they come around the corner.
The nearest is the EMP grenade to take down shields. Shame it doesn't have "interesting" effects on unshielded bodies.