Also, I'd like to be able to sneak up to other players' ships and draw on them. In crayon.
What's the Brand New Feature for ED in 2024?
- Thread starter Cosmo
- Start date
That assumption/suggestion is also one which the INRA research referenced in the Codex(as much as we can believe it) would disagree with, claiming that to a queen the loss of a drone is equal to humans losing an eyelash. That being, not a lot.
So far, they don’t even seem inclined to care too much that their big old capital ships are being reduced to smoldering rubble orbiting an ammonia world. So I don’t think they really need humans to do work for them, unless our appendages and opposable thumbs (if they have nothing of the sort themselves) are somehow more useful to them.
An eyelash apparently has a mass of approximately 0.1mg, so approximately 1/750,000 of a human [1].
That's still - even within the bounds of INRA's accuracy - potentially close to 100,000 times more concern than a superpower government would have for individual human lives.
[1] Of course, while losing all your eyelashes would be a negligible and harmless loss of total mass, it would still be really inconvenient and potentially allow further damage to more valuable structures, so maybe we should be looking more at a 1/400 ratio when it comes to considering "acceptable losses", which is way more than even a small independent faction would value its individual citizens.
I'd be fine with thargified human foot soldiers if they look more like protomolecule-converted humans in the Expanse, not humans with green skin and caustic goo guns. Shaped like humans, but clearly not humans anymore—chitinous exoskeleton, weapons integrated into forearms, no need for spacesuits, some extra parts and growths on the body, some other parts reduced to mere rudiments (like no nose and mouth because they don't need to breathe or eat anymore). Think H.R. Giger's works.
Well, I never said humans were better at it…
Would they? It’s my understanding that Thargoids basically turned themselves biomechanical, not into outright machines, so certain organic components still remain.
And… somehow, I doubt they are just going to plug themselves into charging pods or whatever every day. Then again, maybe they do.
I can see what you were going for, but that looks to me like a zombie Terminator.
I was going to say Borg drone (which lost some skin) but it could also be that…
Humans are powered by ATP. Peter Watts in Blindsight describes aliens that don't breathe, but store huge amounts of ATP to function. Long periods of dormancy, relatively short bursts of activity. No need for atmosphere. Thargs, being masters of bioengineering, could do the same with humans.
Too much zombie, too much hair, too much facial features. Imagine a cross between these:
Smooth featureless face, solid exoskeleton armor with strengthening ridges and green glowing bits, digitigrade locomotion for faster speed and integrated weapons.
And that doesn’t answer why they would bother doing that with humans when they could as well just have their own species doing it. Supposedly Thargoid drones are perfectly fine in a vacuum for a certain time, already.
… though that of course doesn’t cover prolonged stay, but going through all that effort with the abductions for a single-use application in (potentially) covering for the flaws of Banshees and Revenants seems quite wasteful. And pointless.
IIRC, the Martians from HG Well’s The War of the Worlds were described as taking in their nutrients intravenously (paraphrasing here) due to having an atrophied digestive system.
After the battles are done, you need occupying forces to take and maintain control of the enemy. Bureaucrats, law enforcers, diplomats etc. Since the conditions under which humans and thargs can survive long-term are so vastly different, using modified (physically, mentally and ideologically) versions of your own enemy to hold control of earth-like planets makes sense for thargoids. And the batches of your future law enforcers/counter-insurgency forces you create while the war is still going on might as well serve your ongoing war efforts, too. Extra guns on the battlefield and thorough field-testing rolled in one! And if the war is going bad for you, with your motherships destroyed with certainty, you might as well throw everything into the fray--these humiehybrids might just turn the tide, and if not, if you lose the war what are you going to need them for, anyway?
Which would not require them to be physically modified to survive ammonia biospheres, unless they are to roam around Thargoid ships and planets as well. Let alone vacuum…
… and I wouldn’t be so quick to discount the Thargoids from being capable of subterfuge. Assuming I’m using the right term… but a human that looks human yet may not quite be on the inside would be a lot more appropriate to the task, wouldn’t it?
What they do with any which they do decide to use on a battleground is a different matter, but I do would expect some rather different things there. Like that chitinous… whatever. Skin? Armor? Making them vacuum resistant is another task, though.
I think this highlights the fact that bipedal aliens are very much everywhere to some degree, which highlights the expectations/difficulty of trying to re-imagine something in a unique way that conveys the similar process of hybridization. The key points are that if Thargoids were to use humans as hybrids, they would likely retain much of their skeletal structure, otherwise why not then choose horses instead? If this is the case then pretty much all things will end up looking like some Borg, Orc, Android, or Zombie type thing.
So, maybe it's the brain they want? That does open up more potential for variance into greater physical differences, though there still is the issues of training/programming motor neurons to use different placed/sized/quantity of appendages. But maybe that's easily handwaved away, which is fair. But then, maybe they don't want to physically alter the bodies at all and they just want to reprogram the brain to switch to a different psychology/mentality? There's probably room in our brains to hide that sort of thing for it to be activated in a Order 66 type way. But then from the expectations of some players that would be the cheapest cop-out as there would be fundamentally no difference in the models, just behavior, which ironically is exactly what happened in Star Wars with Order 66, nothing changed outwardly, they just aimed their guns in a different direction according to their newly activated neuron paths, which was shown to be a chip in The Clone Wars series, but I digress.
So what does anything of this matter if, as many say, the gameplay is what counts? Would it be better that the "onfoot thargoids" were psychologically activated humans that led to some really good scenarios or gameplay? Or would it be better if they were some wild never seen before type of alien that ended up being boring to fight? Or as doomers would likely say; they'll be basic humans and boring to fight?
I don't know, maybe we've been fighting them already in the form of Banshee's, Revenants etc..
Maybe precisely that, modified humies capable of living long-term in human environments, but also short-term (days, weeks) in thargoid enviros. Ability to survive vacuum is a boon to counter-insurgency and conventional warfare: not all human settlements are located in breathable atmospheres and venting habs/space stations/ships in case of tharg incursion or by thargs to flush out resistance members would be valid tactics. I know I tried it the first time doing a settlement raid
For thargs it might make more sense to modify the soldiers to survive vacuum than equipping them with space suits which are bulky, complicated and power-hungry.Why not both? Some captives are kept physically unmodified to act as sleeper agents or as diplomats/liaison officers; some are more or less heavily modified according to their purpose. Modified humans are also effective psychological warfare, two-pronged at that, too: intimidation via presence of mind-wiped supersoldiers immune to small arms fire and IED-s, and at the same time intimidation via showing what will become of you if you don't conform. I think that by now thargs have a pretty solid understanding of what the concepts of "body horror" and "a fate worse than death" mean to humans
If they’ve been prodding the brains of captives, both pre and during the Titan incursion… assuming they can figure out what those concepts are to us, from their point of view, then… yeah.
It would also probably work on their favor if you couldn’t tell whether that person next to you or flying the ship near you (in a combat scenario against Thargoids, maybe… because, let’s face it… fairly sure those questions are routinely asked in the Elite universe already anyway, without Thargoid influence). Or it would just become worse if that does become the case.
You see Frontier, maybe dropping the story of the Titan arc(the one thing that made it interesting in the first place?) wasn’t the best idea. (Unless you’ve secretly been planning to keep things going at low flame for the first four and then slam right on the gas for the last four)
That's been suggested, and while it's definitely something I would like to see, I have doubts that's what it's going to be.
Although if it does happen, I definitely won't eat a sock.
Although this game is the greatest as is, imo, an added feature to any part of the game is exciting.
As an explorer, if it is exploring related i would be like.......
As an explorer, if it is exploring related i would be like.......
Out of all of them, I would hope it was this. It would tie quite nicely into the actual development of Odyssey to concurrently add base-building too, if you think about it. And then there are the building schematics to be found in the game that have no purpose, yet. The only issue I could see that would go against it would be persistence. I wonder when Frontier will let us know?