Altered Carbon

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PsiTraveller

Cosmic Mongoose
Anyone played around with putting in some Altered Carbon tech into their Traveller game?

If so, what TL would you say the 'stack' is?

The CSC has a personality transfer to an improved body at TL 18. Theev has vat grown 4 term Widows at TL 14. Neural implants and neural links are TL 13.

What do folks think would be a reasonable tech level for implanting a stack and transferring to a regular grade clone. (Neurachem improvements are not stock items, sorry Mr. Kovacs.) :)
 
I don’t know the Altered Carbon milieu at all so take this with a grain of salt but this awesome mash up you imply...

PsiTraveller said:
The CSC has a personality transfer to an improved body at TL 18. Theev has vat grown 4 term Widows at TL 14. Neural implants and neural links are TL 13.
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...averages to TL 15, Maximum Imperial. That to me implies the stack transfer/implant is the hi tech macguffin everyone is clamoring for, while wafer jacks and weapon implants for instance are almost de riguer. So I’d hazard a baseline of TL 15 at least, probably TL 16.

With a little work you could maybe apply the HG TL adjustments (Advanced, Primitive, High Yield, etc) to different aspects of the stack and pull those various TLs you mentioned a little closer together :?:

Cool idea, got me thinking new thoughts about a polity IMTU....
 
It's the cloning/production of new bodies that I wonder about. TL 11 has tougher vat cloned body parts ( pg 100), TL 13 has this made easy (pg 6). So TL 14 is entire bodies like the Widows?

TL 15 or 16 gives you the stack and TL 18 gives you the enhanced body and personality transfer from the supply catalogue. That works. And gives Anagathics a run for the money. A sleeve ages though, so you have to keep replacing it.

So imagine some rich Methuselah in a tricked out ship with all the tech they need to live forever. Tooling around the universe seeing all the things they think they should see. Be an interesting Patron to have.
 
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In case you're wondering, they're clones and the original.
 
If you are talking OTU then dip into T5.

Wafer tech is mature by TL13, as is growing clone bodies and constructing/building synthetics.

The T5/OTU technology only allows for temporary personality overwriting of the host personality. Downloading a copied personality to a cloned body or a synthetic is permanent and is suggested as an insurance policy in T5.

You may also want to check out Mindjammer Traveller...
 
Add a digit to UPP for clone number, use SOC as security clearance. Sounds like another Mongoose RPG.
 
Ahh Lazarus Long/Woodrow Wilson Smith. I have that paperback sitting on my shelf just a few feet from me.

I will look into T5 and the insurance policy. I like the oddness of the tech and looking at the impact it could have on a society as the new tech takes hold. No needlecast in the OTU so no FTL information transmission. This means that Kovacs' stack would have had to be physically jumped from Harlan's World to Earth.

But think about what that means for a Traveller campaign with altered carbon (fancy way of saying cloning tech). There have been discussions on this forum about low berth risks and the easiest way of moving people across space. With altered carbon and stacks a Far Trader could move millions of people in a single jump. The hold would be full of cases of stacks. The infrastructure would not exist in the beginning of the tech, but the possibility is there.

Colony ships would now be carbon factories with minimal crews. Once at a planet the colonists would be sleeved and put to work. The early colonists would be harvesting more carbon to build more clones.
 
https://www.instructables.com/id/Automatic-Light-Up-Altered-Carbon-Hello-Unicorn-Ba/

Create your own screen accurate Hello Unicorn backpack from Altered Carbon that automatically lights up when you unzip and open it. Ever since I first watched the show I've been obsessed with this backpack, so I built one to bring to Denver Comic Con. I even found a Takeshi Kovacs cosplayer to model it for me! I also use it when I teach workshops on costume tech as an example of incorporating electronics into cosplay prop builds.
Click to expand...

This is my hobby project now.

edit: Discovered that you can buy the backpack without the electronics. Do not like the quality.

edit: Using custom lettering. Why not "Hello Moppy"?
 
Condottiere said:
bbeb18e7eef4350c00202c264b7470f8.jpg


In case you're wondering, they're clones and the original.
Click to expand...

I Will Fear No Evil is a RAH novel about a billionaire having his brain transfered into a new body. Not a clone, but a brain-dead donor.
 
In MegaTraveller there was a sidebar that mentions the races that pre-dated the Ancients. Called the first starfarers, they were races that managed to travel interstellar distances using means other than the jump drive - STL ships, extremely long lives, electronic personality transfer are all emtioned as methods used by these races to achieve their intersteller status.

We know from OTU canon that fast STL travel is possible - the boardgames Imperium and Dark Nebula mention ships being able to achieve 0.9c, ehile other sources have more reasonable limits of 0.25 to 0.3c for STL ships - eg the ones that colonised the Islands subsectors.

So how about this.

A TL9 culture of cut off humans fails to develop the jump drive but does have the maneuver drive, gravitics and fusion power. As they exploit their home system they build lots of communication lasers. As they rise through the TLs and send STL ships to nearby systems - taking years to get there - they build laser relay stations between their STL colonised systems. It may take six years for a ship to make the journey to an adjacent system, but communication can now travel at light speed,

Along comes personality copying tech (wafer tech in T5/MgT), cloning and synthetic bodies. You now have the tech to send the electronic personality over intersteller distances, it just takes a few years.

Now think of it from the Envoy's point of view - their personality is copied, the original remains on their home world (stick them in cold sleed for the mission duration if you wat but it is not necessary). The 'clone' awakens the instant the download is complete and from the clone's point of view it was instant (time has passed in the real world). The clone has its adventures, the memories of which are downloaded and beamed back to the original if you want to, or the clone personality is copied and sent to the next world for the next adventure...
 
If you don't synchronise the clones, is it still a clone? The personality will be different, because of different experiences.

This leads to a related question, how many clones can you have active at once?
 
The instant the personality information wakes up in the host body the experiences diverge - the original and the clone are different people.

Original is on world alpha, four years later clone 1 is awoken on world beta - unless you have put Ori in cold sleep (or killed them) Ori already has 4 years experience more than C1. C1 awakens and remembers 4 years ago on world A as if it was yesterday - to them it was.

Downloading the adventures of their clones back into Ori will give Ori the memories of the missions, and may develop personality changes within Ori or even lead to mental trauma - hmm if only we had sanity rules for this... (T5 and MgT companion I believe).
It may be better not to return the clone memories after all.

As to the question of how many clones at once I can not see why you can't have as many as you have bodies for. Every single one of them share past memories and personality and thinks they are Ori - but they are wrong. From the moment they awaken they are individuals, no shared consciousness.

Invoke psionics and all bets are off...
 
Clones would probably collaborate, at least at first. I can see problems with voting systems, for a start. Or maybe they exterminate each other because there can be only 1?

As to combining memories from clones, and the question of insanity, ask a programmer why “git merge” is so problematic.

All we need to do is merge C4’ into C7 (combine teamone’s version of master into actual master). Shouldn’t be any contradictions, right? :-)

To be fair maybe the brain isn’t a logic engine and it can deal with this. I’m going into cryogenics now, wake me up when we have the answer!

V8YzD9l.jpg


Edit: Yes, the arrows are backwards. No you are not mad, C1 is the original back in history. Git is ridiculous yet somehow still useful.
 
I would imagine that any integration of downloaded clone memories would be handled by the host brain as if they were a particularly lucid dream. Our brains cheat in how they make memories.
 
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality
Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see ...
Click to expand...

Or you mean it's just like today when I can't remember if that trip to California was real life, an RPG or recreational drugs?
 
Yup. I have memories of dreams.
I sometimes dream I have memories of things that have happened in other dreams.
I have recurring dreams.

My conscious memory is filled with errors - for example I keep making drunken purchases from Amazon of TV shows I watched years ago. My memory of them is very different to the actual show when I watch it today.
 
1. Each clone is issued with Google Glass.

2. The question is if a person has a unique consciousness/soul, which can't be divided, and delves into magic realism; so the clone goes insane and tries to kill the original, if the original is still existing in the same universe.

3. With psionics you might have a link between the various clones, or at least, that specific batch of clones.

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4. Then again, you can alter them to a specific psychological template(s).

Star-Wars-Kamino-700x300.jpg
 
It’s all fine until it becomes schizophrenia, after which it’s not not fine.
 
Hence the need for sanity rules...

memories of a typical adventure with the usual trials and tribulations would probably be integrated with a minimum of sanity risk. An episode that was particularly traumatic or personality changing would require a greater degree of sanity check.

Imagine waking to find you have memories of falling in love, starting a family, only to have said family wiped out by Mendoza. A family you have never met (yet you are definitely in love with), killed on a planet tens of (light) years ago - his goons killed your puppy too...
 
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