Yeah, getting knocked unconscious is one of those things that's treated as not-a-big-deal in the movies, like you can just punch someone out to get them out of the way for a while and they'll just wake up later and call you a jerk, but..uh.
Yeah.
Getting knocked out is a big deal. There's nothing that can knock you out that doesn't also pose a risk of killing you.
Unsurprisingly, blunt force trauma to the head, or electrical discharges potent enough to overcome the resistance of thick clothing, have extremely poor
therapeutic indices.
When it comes to video games, I blame the introduction of stealth gameplay for the trend.
Thief was a great game, but they gave you this magical cosh, that if used from behind an unaware target, always rendered them unconscious, but never killed. The idea was to incentivize use of stealth mechanisms and discourage open combat, as well as to impress upon the player that the Garrett was a thief, not a murderer. In reality or any plausible facsimile thereof, if you cosh fifty people in the back of the head, half of them are going to either fight back or run off screaming, and a fair number that do go down aren't going to get up again. Skewering them with your sword would be quicker, easier, and more reliably silent...but Garrett likes to do things the hard way and is apparently delusional enough that leaving scores of people to die, but with slightly less blood, and scores more severely brain damaged survivors, in pursuit of material wealth was more acceptable to his sensibilities.
The whole less than lethal thing has been a problem for law enforcement and security forces forever. Even when they are given seemingly reliable
tools to immobilize there are still fatalities, especially when said tools are
used inappropriately by questionably trained morons (not the best example, as everyone survived).
Elite isn't as plausibility focused as it was, but I'd still like to see these less than lethal options...and the gruesome consequences of what happens when they are applied by easily traumatized players who have their CMDRs act even more cavalierly than real police when trying to employ them. Actually, the game kinda already does that...which is how threads like this get started.
Taking the energy tool on overload--that the OP, and quite a few other players, have assumed is non-lethal--as an example, we should look at what this thing must actually be doing to do what it does in game. One run through the suit tutorial will reveal that this device is capable of creating a
visibly ionized channel through a meter of near vacuum, delivering enough energy to overwhelm the surge protection on a security door, and force that door open. I mean, holy ****, that isn't a taser, that's a damned AD&D
wand of lightning...you know, the thing you use to clear entire 60'x10' corridors of hobgoblins by turning the air to ozone and flash boiling cerebrospinal fluid before the DM says there isn't any treasure to collect unless you want to spend the next five hours chissling melted silver out of the cracks in the floor because all of it failed item saving throws vs. lighting and you idiots should have known better because it's a damned lightning bolt. Or, to put it another way, the $250 linear surge protector this computer is plugged into can absorb the energy equivalent to that of .50 BMG at the muzzle of an M2 Browning before being damaged. If I was trying to protect something that was more valuable than $2k of electronic toys, it would be much more robust. And the
game doesn't even downplay the damage...one hit strips shields or kills any unshielded individual. Rockets don't even do that until G4 or G5.
Odyssey players are like...
...then go "I can't believe it's not non-lethal!"
Yeah was a huge bone of contention here for a while with coward punches. A few people got manslaughter rather than murder because they didn't intend to kill them... proven by the punch only rendering them unconscious, and the uncontrolled impact of head on ground killing them which was "totally unintentional". So laws changed.
That's a variant of the
eggshell rule. Getting around such inconvenient liabilities is also why things like qualified immunity exist; police can't be expected to put public safety over their own, or to have basic problem solving skills.
This is where Odyssey gets something right. Settlement security doesn't mess around...it's comply or die (or would be if they didn't suck, but that's another matter), even if the non-compliance is on them. They're legally exempt, and they know it.
