Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

[Absalom]

absalom: pipeline the cooling water for the nuke plant from the sea should work just as well(or if salt is such a issue, just reuse the river water?), gets the water to the arid area, still uses a nuke plant,

I was thinking of tsunamis, actually. I figure that it should be possible to design the reactors to mostly or entirely avoid having pressurized sections, which combined with being located in fairly deep water, would greately reduce the range of stresses that they would encounter.

I could be wrong of course, and I do agree that it would make facility upgrades more difficult.

and you get to keep the power generated instead of using it all....

So use another reactor. The hydrogen gets burned inland, so you can always use turbines or whatever to extract some of the useful energy there, which I believe should also cause the moisture to condense faster too. The point of this proposal was basically to transmit water as efficiently as possible to inland drought-prone areas for rehumidification, so diverting some of the power for actual power uses is putting the cart before the horse.

well, i suppose you could just crack water for hydrogen fuelcells, and let the cars and such do the watering?

Last time I heard, estimates were that there isn't enough accessible platinum on the entire planet to upgrade the current vehicle fleet to fuel cells, so it would need to be hydrogen-fuel internal combustion engines (which can be done, if you improve the lubrication systems: diesel & gasoline actually provide some lubrication, while hydrogen doesn't).

At any rate, I assume that vehicles & power plants would draw from the same pipelines, so 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Arioch, would a cybernetic prosthetic; such as a cyberarm, allow full-bandwidth skin-contact sanzai?

[Arioch]

Arioch, would a cybernetic prosthetic; such as a cyberarm, allow full-bandwidth skin-contact sanzai?

No.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Arioch, would a cybernetic prosthetic; such as a cyberarm, allow full-bandwidth skin-contact sanzai?

No.

Alright. What about a biological prosthetic, like a cloned limb, or a donor limb?

[Tamri]

Alright. What about a biological prosthetic, like a cloned limb, or a donor limb?

It can be assumed that there is contact with the nervous system, ie, It requires certain nerve fiber structure. Therefore, IMHO, regenerated limbs, which replace the lost or transplanted Loroi from Loroi - is able to contact, mechanical - not able to do, and bionic - if it is permissible to have a nerve fiber parameters.

[Arioch]

Arioch, would a cybernetic prosthetic; such as a cyberarm, allow full-bandwidth skin-contact sanzai?

No.

Alright. What about a biological prosthetic, like a cloned limb, or a donor limb?

A regrown or regenerated limb isn't really a "prosthetic", since it's your own tissue and is as "real" as your original limb was, as far as your body is concerned.

Attaching someone else's limb is potentially problematic, since other people's flesh does not conduct telepathic contact (touching person B who is touching person C doesn't give you touch contact with C). I guess it would depend on whether the body accepts or rejects the transplant. As I understand it, limb transplantation seems to be much harder than organ transplantation, which has become routine; even with immunosuppressive drugs, the body tends to reject the new limb and it usually has to eventually be removed. Even in those cases that I've heard of in which the body did not reject the implant, the patients still did not gain significant use of the limb; it was just meat attached to the body. I don't know if this is primarily a immune system issue or a nervous system issue. But if somehow medical science can convince the body to accept the new tissue, and the patient gains full use of the tissue and nervous system, then as above, it becomes part of your body.

[ShadowDragon8685]

A regrown or regenerated limb isn't really a "prosthetic", since it's your own tissue and is as "real" as your original limb was, as far as your body is concerned.

Attaching someone else's limb is potentially problematic, since other people's flesh does not conduct telepathic contact (touching person B who is touching person C doesn't give you touch contact with C). I guess it would depend on whether the body accepts or rejects the transplant. As I understand it, limb transplantation seems to be much harder than organ transplantation, which has become routine; even with immunosuppressive drugs, the body tends to reject the new limb and it usually has to eventually be removed. Even in those cases that I've heard of in which the body did not reject the implant, the patients still did not gain significant use of the limb; it was just meat attached to the body. I don't know if this is primarily a immune system issue or a nervous system issue. But if somehow medical science can convince the body to accept the new tissue, and the patient gains full use of the tissue and nervous system, then as above, it becomes part of your body.

Alright. That leads me to consider the third case I've been leading up to, then: a cybernetic limb with a living flesh outer layer integrated into the owner's nervous system. Based upon the above, then QED it should be capable of being a telepathic conductor.

[Absalom]

Even in those cases that I've heard of in which the body did not reject the implant, the patients still did not gain significant use of the limb; it was just meat attached to the body. I don't know if this is primarily a immune system issue or a nervous system issue. But if somehow medical science can convince the body to accept the new tissue, and the patient gains full use of the tissue and nervous system, then as above, it becomes part of your body.

There's basically two issues there.
1) As I understand it, some of the organs have their own types, analagous to blood types, that transplants can run afoul of;
2) Scar tissue interferes with the repair of the nervous tracks, and unlike blood vessels this isn't curable on the gross scale so it tends to stick: it seems that attempts to bypass the nervous system by artificially transporting the signals across the break can actually result in a partial restoration of the very same nerve pathways that were broken.

Alright. That leads me to consider the third case I've been leading up to, then: a cybernetic limb with a living flesh outer layer integrated into the owner's nervous system. Based upon the above, then QED it should be capable of being a telepathic conductor.

The amount of flesh is likely to have some effect on the strength of the telepathic connection.

[Hālian]

You missed her left shoulder in panel 1 Page 60.

Okay, thanks. There's no need to report "missing" characters in panels; I know they're not there. (Assume they're together with Guard #2 on a noillir break.)

What's noillir?

[Arioch]

Alright. That leads me to consider the third case I've been leading up to, then: a cybernetic limb with a living flesh outer layer integrated into the owner's nervous system. Based upon the above, then QED it should be capable of being a telepathic conductor.

Implanting a foreign object in your arm wouldn't interfere with telepathic touch contact, but I don't see a compelling reason why anyone would want to do something like that.

You missed her left shoulder in panel 1 Page 60.

Okay, thanks. There's no need to report "missing" characters in panels; I know they're not there. (Assume they're together with Guard #2 on a noillir break.)

What's noillir?

It's a mushroom tea.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Implanting a foreign object in your arm wouldn't interfere with telepathic touch contact, but I don't see a compelling reason why anyone would want to do something like that.

Because transhumanism. Or transoriginism, if you're referring to members of non-human races.

What's noillir?

It's a mushroom tea.

Mushroom tea? Huh. I wonder what that must be like...

Is that the only kind of tea Loroi make? No like, berry or herb teas or anything? No weird-medicine infusion teas from Perrin, or nettle teas from highland Deinar areas, or anything?

[icekatze]

hi hi

Given that the Loroi are already an engineered race, and they see themselves as the rightful heirs of the Soia empire, I get the feeling that they already have a general cultural sense of superiority.

[dragoongfa]

Plus Telepathy and Telekinesis.

In the minds of their most chauvinist members they are as close to perfection as is to be expected without being divinity.

[Arioch]

Mushroom tea? Huh. I wonder what that must be like...

Is that the only kind of tea Loroi make? No like, berry or herb teas or anything? No weird-medicine infusion teas from Perrin, or nettle teas from highland Deinar areas, or anything?

They make a variety of beverages, but noillir is the Loroi equivalent of coffee; it's a strong stimulant.

[Tamri]

Can the "Highland" to docking in space with some the other shuttle having airlock? At least through the approach closer and the banal jumping from airlock to airlock.

[Arioch]

Can the "Highland" to docking in space with some the other shuttle having airlock? At least through the approach closer and the banal jumping from airlock to airlock.

Yes, but the other craft would have to have some kind of docking adapter. Highland isn't really designed for this kind of work.

[ShadowDragon8685]

hi hi

Given that the Loroi are already an engineered race, and they see themselves as the rightful heirs of the Soia empire, I get the feeling that they already have a general cultural sense of superiority.

Plus Telepathy and Telekinesis.

In the minds of their most chauvinist members they are as close to perfection as is to be expected without being divinity.

Telepathy and telekinesis are nice; real nice, I'll grant you.
So are wired reflexes, sword arms, subdermal armor, headware computers with augmented reality and your own personal assistant, etc.

Mushroom tea? Huh. I wonder what that must be like...

Is that the only kind of tea Loroi make? No like, berry or herb teas or anything? No weird-medicine infusion teas from Perrin, or nettle teas from highland Deinar areas, or anything?

They make a variety of beverages, but noillir is the Loroi equivalent of coffee; it's a strong stimulant.

It also seems to be at least as addictive as coffee;, we know, at least, that Door Guard #2 and Razorthorn need their hit badly enough to slip off in the middle of a combat alert and risk Stillstorm's wrath to satisfy that craving. (Also, Razorthorn apparently just drinks hers like a shot of whiskey and sprints back to the bridge. )

Would Loroi like coffee, I wonder? Would it have the same effect? Would they find the array of varieties and ways of serving it to be bewildering?

[icekatze]

hi hi

I've been a cyborg before. It's not all it's cracked up to be. The extra maintenance requirements alone are bad enough, but not being able to walk through an airport metal detector without setting it off is just one of the many little things that make being a cyborg a pain. There's also a bunch of unconscious stuff that people tend to take for granted, right up until they don't have it anymore, like unmyelinated tactile-C nerve fibers. I always tell my Shadowrun buddies that it's probably what essence loss feels like.

The other trick is that it is really hard to add functionality once the most intense phase of brain plasticity is over, in the first year or so. Maybe we'll find a way to re-trigger that, but I suspect any such process will involve also radically altering the patient's personality too.

But I digress, if we ever do get some good brain copying technology, I suspect most people will either go all the way, or use removable peripherals. Loroi seem more like the removable peripherals type, and the Umiak seem more like the all the way type.

[Sweforce]

The other trick is that it is really hard to add functionality once the most intense phase of brain plasticity is over, in the first year or so. Maybe we'll find a way to re-trigger that, but I suspect any such process will involve also radically altering the patient's personality too.

I came to think of general Grevioues in the Star Wars. He can split up his arms from two to four but are a lot less articulated on the extra pair and thus generally just set his lightsaber equipped hands spinning. This is very obvious in the animated Clone Wars series where there is frequent encounters with him.

[Tamri]

Is there security systems on Tempest, such as cameras, microphones, it is possible - automatic turrets? Or Loroi didn't think they needed on board?