Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Silas Vitalia]

Discuss!

Most references seem to indicate more of a 'matrix' style plug-in?  Ship plugs into Pod, Pod plugs into the back of your skull, ghost in the shell style.

I've seen references to more of a synesthesia effect. Ship information is translated into sensory input. The pilot 'feels' ship systems, damage, etc.  'One with the ship' sort of model.

These are of course customizable (my assumption). 

I also imagine more of a 'virtual' setup ala the Matrix (again) how the Zion gate operators were all jacked in, and handled all controls / monitoring in a 'virtual' environment customized to their needs.

I don't imagine any capsuleer physically looking at a screen displayed inside the pod, and I also don't imagine capsuleer manually operating any controls. (flight stick, etc), although perhaps in an interceptor they prefer that representation?

Thoughts?

[Lyn Farel]

To my knowledge, combining :

- What we know about the capsule, you are indeed plugged in à la Matrix directly through your spine and immersed into a special fluid supposed to make it even more gross/grimdark/whatever and make us look like adult embryons.

and

- How it is suggested in the Jovian Wet Grave and the Camera Drones chronicles, that the pilots directly sees what the camera drones see...

I would say that the capsuleer awareness is projected into the ship. I highly doubt that all his senses are represented (like pain... why would they need pain, unless they ask for it personnally ?) and at the same way I think it is a lot more complicated than that besides the camera drones. You have to send messages and the likes, and maybe it is my cyberpunk affinity that is speaking here but I see the capsule as an interface like in scify novels to project itself directly "in" the internet, or that kind of thing, but here it is inside the ship functions instead.

[Esna Pitoojee]

I have assumed that the capsule disassociates themselves from their own body while flying a ship via capsule, instead coming to conceptually 'inhabit' the ship as an extension of themself. This is what makes the capsule different from a simple VR environment - and why the danger of mindlock is so great; most normal VRs don't require you to entirely disassociate your mind from your body.

As for the whole 'feedback' thing - I'd assume it's something individual pilots can change, yes. To much of it might drive a pilot mad from repeated exposure; to little wouldn't alert them of necessary warnings.

[lallara zhuul]

The synaesthesia could be just bleedover from bad implants or a psychological side effect that only affects some part of the capsuleer population.

The bit that is more interesting to me is the technology of the pod.

Do the empires actually know how it works?

As you all know, the fluid routers that are part of the cloning process are not part of the original design, does it mean that the capsule actually is less efficient than its counterpart without the extra gadgets?

The communications system is probably just an add-on as well, especially the (alleged) more complex ways of using it. I think that anyone on a ship with right implants (that are probably not even part of the original capsule interface) has exactly the same communication options as the capsuleer.

Does that kind of implants when added to a capsuleer make them less efficient?

The main immersion breaking thing for most roleplayers is the fact that most of the old PF were made to explain how the interface into EVE through the client would be as close to the one that the capsuleer itself has (therefore increasing immersion) while there was other PF created to make parts of the CCP community (ISD and Bughunters) a part of the world of New Eden, while they were nothing but very OOC parts of the game itself.

Personally I would lean towards the view that everything EVE is exactly as it is to the player.

The capsuleer has a crappy interface to use the ship, to interact with the world itself, mainly for the reason that the capsule itself was never really designed to be used by the capsuleer itself.

It is designed to have the capsuleer as the part of the ships systems to make the ship more efficient while the actual experts on the use of such ships would operate the ships themselves.

I would suggest that the capsuleer actually controlling the ship was not part of the original design, but it was added on to the technology mainly because three of the four empires would frown upon a class of people being bred just for the main purpose of being wetware for the next generation of warships.

So they clone them.

And they are dumb enough to pay for it.

[Karmilla Strife]

Another source for the idea that ship systems are translated into sensory input could be the combat booster descriptions. This is especially the case with Blue Pill's description that activating shield boosters is inherently unpleasant.

[Halete]

Going to have to go with synthesia for the reasons mentioned above. Way I see it, Capsule/Capsuleer relationship is very intimate and more 'mind inhabits the ship' than 'capsuleer works in a virtual space'.

So thorough is the link between Capsuleer/Ship that I posit that to a point the ship itself would be able to communicate the thoughts of the Capsuleer - such as hesitation. Excerpt here worded ambiguously (could just be silly prose, could be literal);

'But as Shan swiveled his camera drone to alight on the Legionnaire’s massive bulk turning slowly planetward he fancied he saw the slightest tremor, a flicker in the burners maybe, an invisible apprehension bleeding through the night, staining their resolve.'

It's also a lot more interesting for me personally if I can think of Capsule/Ship in this way. If there's a higher degree of separation and the Capsule becomes just another control space for the ship, there goes all of the interest and romance.

[Lithium Flower]

It doesn't matter, if a screen is projected in front of a capsuleer, or directly into his optical nerves. Our vision is two-dimensional, we can't see in 3D. It is our mind that forms three-dimensional picture from 2D projections.
By looking at a square we can easily imagine a cube.
But try to quickly imagine a tesseract by simply looking at a cube 

[Katrina Oniseki]

It doesn't matter, if a screen is projected in front of a capsuleer, or directly into his optical nerves. Our vision is two-dimensional, we can't see in 3D. It is our mind that forms three-dimensional picture from 2D projections.
By looking at a square we can easily imagine a cube.
But try to quickly imagine a tesseract by simply looking at a cube 

Considering a majority of ship systems are jacked directly into the nervous system, I would imagine that the mind would be capable of far more impressive feats of visualization. We experience those issues you describe because of our organic limitation of simple visual-light stereoscopic vision. What if we had a full flight of camera drones? 3 drones, 5, 7, 20? Reading across various EM bands like IR, UV, visible light, radio, gamma... the whole works? Plus data from our ship sensors like gravimetric, magnetometric, etc...

We have a plethora of brand new senses to draw information from. I highly doubt that we'd have trouble 'seeing' (I use the term loosely) a tesseract while plugged into an entire starship.

[Druur Monakh]

So far I have gone for a mixture of Matrix-like virtual environments (target information read-outs, messages), synthaestesia [sic!] (the ship's systems as extensions of your body, possibly even creating new sensory 'perceptions' which have no biological equivalent), as well as some awareness of the physicality of your situation.

I think that the actual experience would be different for each pilot, and I wouldn't even exclude the possibility that pilots can change the degree of identification with their ship in response to the situation they're in. For example, if traveling through empire, all weapons could be just icons on a VR screen - but as soon as combat erupts, the weapons morph into your "fingers".

While this is a sort of hand-wavy "whatever you want it to be" explanation, it does have its narrative opportunities: imagine a pilot who for some reason can only use the VR experience, and not the body-extension one. Such a pilot would have to think about every action they want the ship to do, instead of just doing it, and would thus make a horrible combat pilot.

[lallara zhuul]

You guys do know that synaesthesia is a neural condition.

Which is quite rare.

Which is basically bleedout of brain impulses laterally from one part of the brain to the other giving you involuntary misinformation connected to the things that have that bleedout effect.

What you seem to be referring to is ideasthesia.

Which is a different animal.

I would love the fact that to be a capsuleer you would have to be a more of a delusional bastard than they already are.

The problem for me, with the ship==me approach, has always been the fact that piloting the capsuleer ship is unwieldy. Manual piloting is pretty much hell. There is no such thing as manual targeting or shooting, pretty much every aspect of the control of the ship is automated.

Pick a warping distance.
Pick the orbit distance.
Pick your alignment.

It is impossible for you to point a gun at anything and shoot.

You have to wait for the automated systems of the ship to first get a target lock to the CONCORD authorized target transponder and then activate the automated firing cycle of the weapon of your choice.

That, to me, is far from freedom of full sensory displacement of self to a ship.

Not to mention the psychological ramifications such sensory data alteration would mean.

If a person loses all sensory data from a leg, for example, they might throw that leg, which is still attached to the rest of your body, out of the bed without thinking about the consequences. (I've heard that in the hospitals it is quite common to be picking up people from the floor beside their bed that have this kind of condition.)
Which to a person with regular sensory data of their body seems insane.
Not to mention the fact that as humans we are so connected to our sensory data from our bodies that if we lose a limb, our brains can still keep feeding us that sensory data for years and years after the fact.
Ask any amputee.

Kinesthesia and proprioception, our main ways of experiencing our bodies.

Haptic perception, or the sense of touch, is another completely different animal.

'Feeling the crew of the ship moving' would go to the realm of interoception, which is another different animal altogether.

Humans are much more complex things that I think people believe, because of that complexity they are also very fragile. There is adaptability in the human system but it is very limited. It took us billions of years to evolve into what we are at the moment, just slapping on extra senses and sensory experiences would be completely incomprehensible to our brains and in the worst case scenario would drive us completely insane.

Unless you want to be heavily dosed in Acid all the time and taste colours with your teeth.

Which is cool.

TL:DR
Sensory data and how it is used to experience the world around us is a lot more complex subject than just 'feeling the world around us'.
Our minds are fixed on the sensory data that we normally have and messing with it is a bad thing.

[Halete]

TL:DR
Sensory data and how it is used to experience the world around us is a lot more complex subject than just 'feeling the world around us'.
Our minds are fixed on the sensory data that we normally have and messing with it is a bad thing.

Not to offend, but this was a fairly belabored post to explain something which is already well-established.

Of course it's insane to us, who at least grasp the complexities of our body and 'self' and have normal senses of sensation and ourselves. That's what makes it so fucking brilliant to explore as a Sci-Fi concept. And the dangers are shoved in our face by the game.

I don't think anybody is being nearly as naive as you seem to imagine. It's good that you struggle with the 'ship = me' line of thought because you are absolutely given every single reason to as a human. This is what makes the idea in and of itself attractive.

Re; Synthaesia, fairly certain that we're using the term as a naturalization. Could be wrong, but that's what I immediately thought taking from the context of Silas' post.

[Silas Vitalia]

I'm going to go with there being a multiplicity of connection methods, customizations, and interpretations of the interphase.

The 'ship is me' makes more sense to my pea-brain when we are talking about 'manageable' ships (the smallest interceptors or frigates) with very tiny crews, etc.  But we have to get into some serious trans-humanist areas when our little capsuleer brains are plugged into capital ships and titans, with god knows how many thousands of crews, millions of subsystems, and the like.  Although I imagine the years of 'skillbook' training perhaps represent the extensive level of augmentation required... food for thought.

The topic is something I'm comfortable leaving more nebulous for fiction purposes. 

I like the idea of the capsuleer being aware of every-little-thing aboard the ship while plugged in.  Overhearing conversations in the hallways, being aware of the mess hall on deck 24's ambient room temperature, noticing the diagnostic that crew member so-and-so is conducting it taking way too long, maybe diverting a few seconds of conscious attention to reprimand them personally via holo, etc.   I think as the 'skill' and age of the capsuleer increases they can focus more and more on all things at once.  Taking your first frigate out can perhaps be overwhelming, and you can only concentrate on -flying- the damn thing straight for the first few years.  Maybe ten years later your brain has been so modified and you have so many implants that you are monitoring thousands of data streams simultaneously on your capital ship while having enough attention left over to argue the finer points of wine production in The Summit channel.

*shrug*

[lallara zhuul]

Seems like you bought the demigod cookie and ate it.

*shrug*

[Silas Vitalia]

Seems like you bought the demigod cookie and ate it.

*shrug*

I didn't buy it, ccp is pretty explicit with that characterization, and uses the word demigod in many of their references to capsuleers.

[Horatius Caul]

For once I think I actually have to agree with Lallara.

God knows I've toed the demigod line in the past, but the fact of the matter is that most of the stuff capsuleers use to interface with the pod was retrofitted to the point of becoming the equivalent of an Ork looted vehicle. The idea that Jovian capsuleers fill a completely different role than CONCORD capsuleers do is also very interesting.


That said, the idea of wiring technological sensors to existing senses isn't completely unfounded. Kevin Warwick, the (in)famous cyberneticist, demonstrated that the human brain will naturally accept new senses readily and incorporate them into existing sensory "frameworks" when he wired a set of ultrasound emitter/sensors directly into his nervous system, allowing him to "see" in complete darkness. Do some reading on extra-sensory input.