[Lore] Death in Elite

Davadin

Davadin
How does Elite's lore deal with death?

When my ship got blown to pieces, I get it that it's now respawned in the last station I was docked. Afterall, I did pay for the         insurance.

But how did *I* get there??

Is there cloning technology? Is... it that I'm somebody else using the same name? Did drifted in space after it exploded? in a crygenic pod or something?

How? Why?

Thanks!
 

CMDR M. Lehman

CMDR M. Lehman
FDev hasn't gone into detail as to how exactly the process works, but it *is* possible to eject (since you are strongly urged to do so as your ship is exploding!), and there *are* escape pods in-game. At least, there are escape pods in specific areas that you can salvage. Obviously there's no pod to scoop up if a wingmate or NPC gets destroyed, but there is at least some semblance of explanation for how you, the lucky commander, finds himself consistantly waking up in the last spaceport he was in.

If you're concerned about RP, I would say to just go with whatever explanation seems the most plausible. It's entirely possible to overapply a realistic standard of causality to a computer game.

For what it's worth, Star Citizen appears to have a very detailed and thought-out death mechanic. You wake up in a hospital the first few times, then you have a cybernetic limb, and at some point it's lights out. At least, that's the oversimplified gist of what I read in one of their newsletter. If that game ever gets off the ground, it would be very interesting indeed to see how death is handled in a gaming atmosphere where permanently dying hasn't been a thing since the mid- '90s!
 
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Marra Morgan

Marra Morgan
I'm happy with escape pods :)

Maybe, because they are cryogenic and cold, our sensors don't pick them up, or they have some sort of shielding on them. The ones we find in salvage sites might be damaged in some way, so we can see them on the scanner. That's what I reckon.

I didn't like all that cloning / cryostatic pod stuff from EVE.
 

Davadin

Davadin
Ya I had Eve before and the clone... not a big fan, but it made sense. Also, old school Star Wars Galaxies had interesting RP for death as well (as well as permanent death for Jedi character...)

Even Lord of The Rings Online, you get "defeated" and you looked like you're disabled, until you get "revived" by a Minstrel, etc...

I think I'll stick to auto-eject and the pod got auto-guidance/auto-cruise to the latest station...
 

Xeknos

Xeknos
I'm going with a sort of escape pod/REMLOCK explaination, where you eject, black out, and somehow end up at a station. I've never been a fan of clones.
 

Tom Melegaris

T
In the Elite I played back in the day.... your progress was saved to disk at the last station you visited. I always imagined there was a group like our Fuel Rats going around and bringing in downed player escape pods. Now it seems there is a mysterious, nameless, and faceless insurance corporation doing that. As an avid reader of various science fiction novels, especially ones written by Iain M Banks, Dan Simmons, and Alastair Reynolds; cloning, cryogenics, generation ships, technological immortality, etc., a corpus vile existence - a life where the physical body does not really matter and is expendable, is not that far of a stretch of my old noggin. In one of I. M. Banks book the main character had his body regrown from his disembodied head, it was saved by an advanced crash helmet. In Woody Allen's Sleeper, a character is reconstructed and reconstituted from its remaining nose. I only ask that if and when the animation is finally made that my body parts are put back in proper places... don't want to hear, "Hey its good to see you again, I thought we lost you at Gama Hydra Six, why you are wearing a sombrero hat now? Oh I see you went with the cheapo insurer again and that is not a banana under there..." :p

*ducks back under a lamp shade*
 

Davadin

Davadin
Tom Melegaris said:
In the Elite I played back in the day.... your progress was saved to disk at the last station you visited. I always imagined there was a group like our Fuel Rats going around and bringing in downed player escape pods. Now it seems there is a mysterious, nameless, and faceless insurance corporation doing that. As an avid reader of various science fiction novels, especially ones written by Iain M Banks, Dan Simmons, and Alastair Reynolds; cloning, cryogenics, generation ships, technological immortality, etc., a corpus vile existence - a life where the physical body does not really matter and is expendable, is not that far of a stretch of my old noggin. In one of I. M. Banks book the main character had his body regrown from his disembodied head, it was saved by an advanced crash helmet. In Woody Allen's Sleeper, a character is reconstructed and reconstituted from its remaining nose. I only ask that if and when the animation is finally made that my body parts are put back in proper places... don't want to hear, "Hey its good to see you again, I thought we lost you at Gama Hydra Six, why you are wearing a sombrero hat now? Oh I see you went with the cheapo insurer again and that is not a banana under there..." :p

*ducks back under a lamp shade*
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/claps!

Well explained!
 

Miko_Stargazer

Miko_Stargazer
Xeknos said:
I'm going with a sort of escape pod/REMLOCK explaination, where you eject, black out, and somehow end up at a station. I've never been a fan of clones.
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In order to RP justify how someone who blows up at Beagle's Point finds their way back to the bubble, you have to assume your remlock system has some FSD drive attached to it. I suppose when your pod weighs less than 1T, it'd get some decent jump range :p

It definitely is a tricky situation. I kind of like the idea of like a 'micro FSD drive.' It's small, and one use only, burns itself out on use, but can launch anything less than 500 pounds halfway across the galaxy. Perhaps it has to be keyed to some specific location as well, quantumly entangled to another locale and turning on the micro FSD makes it fly through spacetime to meet back up with its partner.
 

Becks

Becks
Miko_Stargazer said:
In order to RP justify how someone who blows up at Beagle's Point finds their way back to the bubble, you have to assume your remlock system has some FSD drive attached to it. I suppose when your pod weighs less than 1T, it'd get some decent jump range :p

It definitely is a tricky situation. I kind of like the idea of like a 'micro FSD drive.' It's small, and one use only, burns itself out on use, but can launch anything less than 500 pounds halfway across the galaxy. Perhaps it has to be keyed to some specific location as well, quantumly entangled to another locale and turning on the micro FSD makes it fly through spacetime to meet back up with its partner.
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I bet the navies wouldn't think 10 seconds about it, before they strap a bomb onto such a drive :D
 

Siobhan

Siobhan
I guess technically, after ejecting, you *should* wake up at the nearest friendly station rather than the last one you docked at.

My thought is the insurance company have a beacon on your pod, and pick you up when they pull in the remains of your ship.
 

lordpsymon

lordpsymon
My take on death is to ignore the in-game mechanics of it if you are writing a story. Death in-game works the way it does because video game. How it works when your character gets blown up entirely depends on how you want them to resolve their unfortunate situation, if you even want them to.
 

Miko_Stargazer

Miko_Stargazer
Becks said:
I bet the navies wouldn't think 10 seconds about it, before they strap a bomb onto such a drive :D
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You could probably handwave this in a few ways, like it's a rough trip and all electronics get totally fried during transit (that'd explain why you can't take any exploration data with you on an SD card in your escape pod :p ) If you operate under the idea that your pod is anchored to some specific area through "entanglement" or another misappropriation of quantum physics, it would make this a much less practical weapon delivery system as well. It would also provide a justification for why you end up in the last station you were docked at (though not why you have a new ship waiting for you there :p )

You could also argue the navies of Elite operate under some rules of war. I've never heard of nuclear strikes after WW3, and using something on that scale would be the only time using these systems would be practical.

I do think it'd be cool if when you exploded instead of just a black screen with "you were killed by Johnny Depp" or whatnot you had some super fancy witch-space animation, showing how your REMLOCK is transporting you to safety.


Mighty Dangerous said:
http://www.elitehomepage.org/dkwheel.htm

All explained in here although it's not 100% canon anymore but will explain the escape pod.
It is a short and brilliant read and does explain who we are.
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The Dark Wheel works under the "beacon and rescue" method. This works perfectly as long as you're inside the bubble. If you're out in the black in a system no one else has ever been to....

Of course as lordpsymon points out, it's a game mechanic and you can never create a perfect lore explanation. If and when Miko Stargazer finds her ship blown apart around her, whatever seems most interesting is what will happen in terms of escape pod etc.
 

Becks

Becks
Miko_Stargazer said:
You could probably handwave this in a few ways, like it's a rough trip and all electronics get totally fried during transit (that'd explain why you can't take any exploration data with you on an SD card in your escape pod :p ) If you operate under the idea that your pod is anchored to some specific area through "entanglement" or another misappropriation of quantum physics, it would make this a much less practical weapon delivery system as well. It would also provide a justification for why you end up in the last station you were docked at (though not why you have a new ship waiting for you there :p )

You could also argue the navies of Elite operate under some rules of war. I've never heard of nuclear strikes after WW3, and using something on that scale would be the only time using these systems would be practical.

I do think it'd be cool if when you exploded instead of just a black screen with "you were killed by Johnny Depp" or whatnot you had some super fancy witch-space animation, showing how your REMLOCK is transporting you to safety.
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Damn, I slept through WW3 xD

But for real, as far as I know, both major superpowers were only kept by the nuclear balance in check. There were several points in history, like Cuba 1962, the Korea War or the incidents around Stanislaw Jewgrafowitsch Petrow, where the world was merely one wrong decision from total annihilation. And rules in war never really worked out through history, so I assume they won't in the future. :)

But for the sake of the game (and to avoid creating ridiculous strong weapons of mass destruction) you could of course handwave it :)
 

mossfoot

mossfoot
You might like the explanations I infer for my Pilot Ejection Table. :)

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=107694



Basically, my belief is that your seat is equipped to give a short supercruise "hop" a few light seconds away from the ship, thus clearing you of a battle or asteroid or whatever. I'm thinking a one shot device that burns out upon use, but also generates a "pulse" that alerts S&R regardless of distance (using the same hyperwave communication tech we use to talk instantly between systems or read GalNet regardless of distance)

Special Search and Rescue ships regularly pick up these people and for insurance/legal reasons have to return you to the last station you were registered (docked) at. These rescue ships can go great distances quickly, so even explorers are rescued by them (but they're also stripped down and basically just a hyperdrive, nav system, and cargo scoop, so not of any use to us regular pilots)

For lore purposes, this can take anywhere from minutes to hours to even days (for deep space explorers). RemLok is more than capable of keeping the pilot alive (though comatose) for that long.

Obviously some time lag has to be assumed on the part of the player - but being a persistent multiplayer game we can never jump in time so it always comes across as instantaneous.
 
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Miko_Stargazer

Miko_Stargazer
Becks said:
Damn, I slept through WW3 xD

But for real, as far as I know, both major superpowers were only kept by the nuclear balance in check. There were several points in history, like Cuba 1962, the Korea War or the incidents around Stanislaw Jewgrafowitsch Petrow, where the world was merely one wrong decision from total annihilation. And rules in war never really worked out through history, so I assume they won't in the future. :)

But for the sake of the game (and to avoid creating ridiculous strong weapons of mass destruction) you could of course handwave it :)
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Isaac Asimov hand-waved it in his Foundation Series by creating a deep cultural taboo of using atomic weapons, one of his characters provides an anecdote to demonstrate this of a rebel commander losing a war who proposes convering their ship's reactor cores into bombs and his crew instantly mutinies over the thought.

Gotta give it some sort of handwave because technically every ship in the Elite universe is one modification away from being an H-bomb.
 

Cmdr Black

Cmdr Black
Don't know if anyone who posted here will see this but from the manual: "If your ship is destroyed, your personal escape system will kick in and eject you from the ship, micro jumping you to the last starport you docked in, where you will be processed by the authorities and your insurance company."
 
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