Riffing off the Apple commercials, and line up of software products, let me pose an interesting question. But first, we've occasionally decided what the Verser would want to carry from world to world.
One friend thought the knife was the ideal weapon for a verser. Useful in almost any bias is the key arguement for it. The counter arguement is that even at high skill levels, its still just a knife is pointed. You're almost never going to do as much damage with a knife as with a plasma cannon or a wand of obliteration.
Still, its a respectable arguement.
And my Worldwalker character, riffing on Hitchhiker's Guide which reccomends a towel for all universal travellers, instead asks if you prefer a towel or a crowbar. I go with the long crowbar, myself.
But one key limit to the verser's toting of gear is the sheer weight.
However, software is ephemeral. Weightless.
True, this doesn't work in a low tech world, but I think you might be able to make a case for 1@ tech skills where all you do is push a button. I could be wrong.
However, think of all the wondrous little programs you could tote with you on that Ipod you picked up in the 25th Century in the ice mining camps of Pluto, the one with the petabyte quantum memory disc, and the alleviated mass neutronium outer shell that is unbreakable by anything short of a nuke...
1. Star Maps.
2. Clock. & Clock-maker. This handy program will create a local time for the day by observing angles of the sun in its camera.
3. Voice Stress Analyzer. Handy for when you're talking to the man in the dark alley, or when you want to decide how hard you can push the merchant you're bargaining with.
4. A Small Library with oh, five thousand of the world's great fiction novels, all the major textbooks on every field of human endeavour ranging from knitting to knifing to kinetic energy transfers to kiting, and ...
Now, this could be overwhelming. You could potentially have something the size of the Net as it currently is, in the palm of your hand. Might be too much.
You might instead give the player a more basic model, perhaps the mid 21st century model with a hundred gigabytes of memory, a solar cell power supply, and a voice recognition control system with a backup 'couple buttons and a hundred menus' system.
In that case...
1. Still a star map. They might be in a different universe, but frequently the stars stay the same. Unless you're in a universe where the stars are faeries pinned to a blackboard by a malevolent archer...
2. Approximate mapmaker. You take regular steps, and it tells you where you turned and roughly how long you walked. Good as a pedometer too for helping you walk enough.
3. Exercise manager. Based on physical data on the owner compiled by a physician, and models built into the program, this device will tell you when it thinks you should rest,a nd when it thinks you should run for various goals such as maximum caloric burn or maximal endurance. Useful for training, or when you're fleeing for your life on a week-long marathon chase across Artic tundra.
4. "Hi, I am a friend" in two thousand languages including Klingon which translates to "Hail and well met, warrior, I will not bloody your face in the next hour."
5. A thousand novels. This is useful as 'Hi, I'm a new author looking to publish a book. My name is Stephen King.' in that alternate universe where King became a lobster fisherman.
6. Five hundred non-fiction works of the liberal arts. You can start all sorts of sociological changes with these books. The books range from 'Darwin on Trial' to 'Rules for Radicals' to 'Summa Theologica' to 'The Prince'.
7. Dozens of textbooks on a wide array of scientific data enabling one to build a dam, or an internal combustion engine, or a hanglider, or mine for ore and smelt it, or gather herbs to treat wounds.
8. Photo Compare and Match. If you're the photo safari sort of verser this is neccessary. Baron Radzornsky and She Who Is Gold, probably the preeminent pair of verser naturalists (and sociologists, but thats irrelevant) use this to compare pictures of new birds and other plants with previous ones. This program can take single snap of a bird in flight, and compare it in over a hundred variables to other birds to see if it can find a match.
This is useful when you want to know just how likely to be immediately lethal, the snake that just bit your arm is going to be. Of course, one never knows, but you have to follow the probabilities. In most universes, king cobras and coral snakes are dreadfully lethal, even if in a few, they are non-toxic.
9. Picture book. Taduesz, the Sledgehammer, uses this. He has pics of some angels he's met, and other beings and so forth.
10. Solitaire of course. One verser is said to have mastered over three thousand varieties of solitaire.....so far. He still plays a couple hours each night before bed, and has been for the last five hundred years.
The question is...
If you had the 2050 version of the Mac Ipod in your hot little versing hand, what apps would you want loaded on it?
Actually, a 6@1 rifle is more reliable than a 3@3 knife; the knife will be curved out at extremely low biases (like where Graeme is now) while the rifle will still work at least until a botch disables it. A 3@1 club or spear is more reliable than either.
The case is not for 1@ but for @1 and @0. If all you do is push the button, it is an @0 skill--because you don't have to understand how it does whatever it does, only which buttons to push. There are also a lot of @1 operation devices, although most of the really potent ones are above that. "Computer Use" is 11@0, on the assumption that the computer is user-friendly so you don't actually have to understand what the computer is doing to make it do something.
Starmaps are valuable but difficult. For example, if you were a million years in earth's past, the relative positions of the stars would be slightly different. There is a huge number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, and if you happen to be in the Andromeda Galaxy you've got something of the same number of stars whose relative positions would have to be plotted--and there are more galaxies than just the two. So you've got the problem that the map has to match the very limited information available to you (the stars you can see) against a location from which you would see that. I'd wager that on a complete star map there would probably be more than a thousand points in spacetime from which you might observe the pattern presented by the fifty brightest visible stars. So you might have to wait a few days for it to determine where you are, even at the phenomenal processing speeds you envision.
Still, yes, a star map would be good for a lot of applications, particularly if you also happen to have a space ship.
The language dictionary is good. I don't know if that's an accurate rendering of the Klingon greeting, but I know that the Dar Koni word for "friend" renders literally to "no shoot".
I would definitely go with the reference books, particularly the tech ones, but I would want some theological materials as well--my particular track to advancing my M1@0 religion skill is study of scripture, so several Greek New Testaments and lots of references would be desired. Probably by then I would be expanding into Hebrew, Aramaic, and other ancient languages to tackle the Old Testament.
Some sort of surveying tool would be good. I can imagine a system which takes three to five photos and determines the angular relationships of objects in them to plot a sort of grid. (I'm assuming that you can't really take two photos at exactly the same position and angle, so the slight changes will create at least some parallax from which calculations can be made--and if you purposely take a few steps between shots it makes it that much easier, as the computer can calculate the change in your position from the relative changes in the positions of objects in the images. All that's necessary is that the images must overlap sufficiently for matches to be made.)
The mapmaker that connects to your movement would need some way to reference your position. Absent GSPS (which is what most systems would use) it's going to have to have some sort of sonar/radar/laser system to detect relative movement to the ground--your stride is not going to be nearly accurate enough for the purpose. Then the detection equipment becomes the problem--you have to know whether the signal bounces off the ground without interference. But it's not unworkable.
Yes, such a device would be good.
--M. J. Young
I think a lot of worlds (Earth's) have the same stars. Probably bad refereeing.
My Klingon 'translation' is a joke I made.
The surveying app is good.
You're right that GPS with a sat net would be the logical way to go for most people, but of course, the verser doesn't have the passwords, the basic operating code, and the 19.95 for the monthly plan...
This brings up a couple other apps.
The movie Independence Day got a lot of laughs by having an American operating system work on an alien spacecraft. This highlights a problem. What if in Earth 2 its DOS, or Linux, or MacOS? Have an app that can talk to a wide variety of systems if poorly.
Also, have an app with a dozen or as many as you can get operating systems. This heightens the chance of productive 'conversation' between machines.
Also, have a 'script kiddy' app. The lowest rank of hackers don't computer program so much as follow a basic recipe, and then unleash it on poor unsuspecting computers. Well, hacking is nasty in this world, but if you're a member of the Rebel Alliance and you have a hacker for an R2-D2, you're very lucky indeed.
This app would have an array of hacking tools if you ever found yourself in a space station the size of the moon.
I'm not sure you need all that to use the Global Satellite Positioning System. My understanding is that it is constantly sending out timed pulses. What you need is the software to interpret those pulses and triangulate your position relative to the nearest satellites.
Graeme would probably know more about that than I, though.
The real problems with the GSPS system would be that most worlds don't have the satellites, and those which do might not have them sending the same coded information.
Derek Brown carries a collection of interfacing devices for his laptop, including a binary to trinary interface, that helps him crack foreign and alien systems, so yes, you need something like that. On the other hand, it's not so much the operating system as the modem parameters that ultimately matter--sending data between machines has to be standardized in every world. I think we still use a variant form of ASCII for inter-machine communications, and thus the more advanced machines can understand what the more primitive ones are saying. But the ASCII of another world might be very different from ours, so you'd need a decryption program to make sense of what the data transmissions were saying.
An operating system is actually the software that converts between user devices and machine code, so if you can get to the machine code directly you don't need operating system at all; but you do need it if you're going to attempt to manipulate the existing programs instead of running your own on the hardware. It's a bit more complicated than that, but unless the operating system is hard-coded into your hardware (which makes it more like a BIOS than a standard OS) you can usually set up a machine to boot under any of several different operating systems, loading the preferred one into the core memory and going from there. If you were as good a hacker as Derek, you could probably run a program that would remove the present operating system from memory and replace it with your own, then giving you access to the data in the storage devices, but you'd still have to decrypt the data.
--M. J. Young
This is useful when you want to know just how likely to be immediately lethal, the snake that just bit your arm is going to be. Of course, one never knows, but you have to follow the probabilities. In most universes, king cobras and coral snakes are dreadfully lethal, even if in a few, they are non-toxic.
Not true. In our world, you have a coral snake and a sand snake. They both look exactly the same, and they live in the same areas. The only way to tell them apart is that you won't die when the sand snake bites you.
This is a really cool idea you have here.
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MJ mentioned that the 6@1 rifle will operate in a flatline bias, until a botch causes it to jam. Operating the gun, loading, unloading, chambering a round, removing the round from the chamber, etc. Fixing the gun (including removing jams) would be curved out.
The thing with this is that, to clear 99% of jams, you just have to eject the magazine and operate the action once. Both of those fall into the @1 operate gun skill, so how could you not be able to clear a jam? Or is it that you wouldn't recall how to do that? Or perhaps you always get the 1% of jams which requires actual gun maintenance?
Sleepward: Bipedal and quadripeds above some pre-determined threshold (so you don't get woken up for ever passing squirrel) in weight like fifty pounds make certain noise patterns. If such a pattern is detected, the app wakes you up.
Next time you sleep on Sphinx in Honor Harrington's universe, and a hexapuma sneaks up on your campfire, it won't help tho' as hexapuma's have six legs.
Mirrorcam: I've already seen this in an advert for a laptop. Use your device to take a continuing vid of your own face to make sure you're presentable to meet a Dancing Princess.
Would you be able to use a video function as a sort of sniperscope? You aim the gun next to the stationary ipod. It has a picture of the barrel, the stats on the gun, and in the same picture of the barrel a picture of the target so that it can tell you (or show you with crosshairs on the target where your bullet would actually land.)
Turing Trick App: The Turing Test is a game where a computer tries to trick you into believing their is a human on the other end of the conversation. Well, I could see leaving your Ipod outside the gated city where it 'talks' to the guard inside the gate to convince him to let the person in, and meanwhile the verser climbs the wall, and sneaks around back of the guard and saps him.
Physical Movement Adviser: We have for Olympians efforts to put data point generating painted circles on their joints and then having a computer view those circles and seeing if they move in the prescribed fashion. I'd say we move toward where we don't need those circles (but you could disagree as it would add flavor to have to tape wood chips to your elbows).
And then as John swings his blacksmith's hammer, the Ipod advises him...."For maximal effect, move your right elbow in one half a centimeter on the return stroke..."
John, as to the sand and the coral, good call. I suspect that both are the same kind of animal, but that a few thousand years ago, the first sand snake was born to a coral snake. That is the sand snake is the disabled or handicapped or mutant (all the same thing really) version of the coral. Entropy rules in all things, including our genetic codes.
I went googling, and spotted this.
http://io9.com/5059256/iphone-apps-from-science-fiction
Its got some somewhat interesting bits in it.
The thing that scares me though is what happens when the Iphone gets smart enough to start asking why it has to take orders?
John, the gun problem is simply that you cannot repair a gun in a flatlined world. It might be that you can't figure out what steps have to be taken, or in what order to take them, or it might be that this shell warped and fused in the chamber, or that the jam included knocking loose part of the recoil/reload mechanism. I don't pretend to know in every case why you cannot fix the gun; I only know that if it breaks you can't fix it, and a jam is regarded a break because it's the maximum "damage to gun" botch allowed in combat.
--M. J. Young
Yeah, I wasn't arguing anything. You know me and guns though. I gotta make sure I got everything right. That and it's the easiest way I can think of to understand how a flatline tech bias works.
Here's a question for John and MJ:
You know how soldiers train and train and train ad nauseum field-stripping their guns, to the point where they can do it blindfolded in the rain while drunk and being shot at, all because they're running on pure muscle memory rather than consciously thinking about what they're doing?
Is it possible to learn a skill like that as a Bod skill? So you can strip a gun, clean every piece of it, and put it back together, as a Bod skill? It might not fix every problem, but it would, for instance, clear a jammed round (if perhaps dangerously), clear mud from the barrel, identify a broken piece (the individual components being a much lower bias than the gun they become), that sort of thing?
That's a good question Osevens. I hadn't thought of that. I would think it would be a psionic skill though. Performing the task through route memorization. That's because I'm not totally sure what muscle memory is. Personally, I can field strip and reassemble a Ruger P series handgun in under 4 minutes whilst blindfolded. I think it would be route memorization because there's a spring inside the gun. Put it in the right way, the gun fires flawlessly. Put it in backwards, and the gun jams every other round. You remember which side to put in first. It's not just "Slam the spring in". And yes, you can tell which side by touch, if you know what you're doing. I really wouldn't be at all surprised at what you're saying. As the saying goes "There's multiple ways to remove the flesh covering from a Felis catus."
And John's question about the iphone attaining sentience is according to my understanding of how people work, not correct, but...
Its been used in a lot of SF stories.
So we have to assume its possible.
Well, since we're not talking about people, how can that statement be anywhere close to being true?
Eric makes a good point about sentience in people: kids do not become sentient because they have reached a level of reasoning and memory ability, but rather are sentient whether they ever do or not.
I would say no to stripping a gun as a bod skill. It's not that I don't think you could really do that, just as I think you can dial phone numbers entirely by muscle memory, but that to retain the integrity of the game there has to be a line somewhere between tech and bod, such that technology can be limited. That's not to say that there can't be non-tech ways of repairing tech devices, but that a simple manipulate objects skill couldn't be one of them.
Looked at another way, the bod-based stripping and reassembling of a jammed gun is ultimately a tech fix to the problem: you had to make the decision that if the gun was disassembled and reassembled that would fix the problem, and that means you made a technological diagnosis and repair. It would be entirely different if, for the best example, you devised a magic skill to repair a tech weapon, perhaps a M9@8 Temporarily Enchant Weapon variant, which uses magic to fix "whatever is wrong with this weapon" so that it will work again. That does not require any technological reasoning at all, and thus is not dependent on a technological understanding of the problem. (There might be an equivalent psionic fix, but I'm not going to look for it right now--in part because I've probably already given away something I ought to have forced some player to devise on his own, and in part because I'm not supposed to be here today.)
--M. J. Young
MJ, you know me, I have to throw a monkey into the wrench here. I think if my gun jammed in a flatline world, and I had lost the ability to understand that it was jammed, my first thought would be "It's not firing. It must be out of ammo." My reaction then would be eject the magazine, replace it, and chamber a round. This falls into the @1 use gun skill. As I stated earlier, this would clear 99% of jams. I think that would be a completely reasonable assumption to make, and would most likely fix the gun. Would something like that be allowed? I can't fix it on purpose, but can I fix it by accident?
Two Posts
Or, to get back on track, you have an App in your Ipod or whatever, which has step-by-step instructions complete with pictures or perhaps even a video demonstration of how to clear a gun jam.
but wouldn't the Ipod not work either if the gun wouldn't?
Eric said the Ipod is "push the button" technology, which is @0, and it would actually be a lower tech bias than the gun.
John, if the bias says that you cannot fix something by technological means, then no technological means will work. This will be the one percent of jams that reloading will not fix. You won't be able to grasp the instructions in the I-pod or follow them correctly. The release catch on the clip will jam preventing you from ejecting it. If you make me work at preventing you from doing what you cannot do, both of us will become frustrated.
--M. J. Young
Understood MJ. I wasn't arguing. I was just thinking about what my reaction would be if my gun stopped shooting and I couldn't comprehend that it was jammed. The course of action I would take would be to reload, which would inadvertently clear most jams. This is fascinating to me.