Print

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

[Aria Jenneth]

Is there anything out there that anyone has read on whether DUSTies get to keep their original faces? What they look like under their visors?

I don't think I can explain the full mechanics of why I ask this question without violating my NDA, but, as you might gather from the DUST dev blogs, we can burn through clones at a fearful rate. I know that some of the early stuff suggested they would be bald. Is there anything solid on this, in Templar One or elsewhere?

(It makes a substantial difference in what Tarquin walking into The Last Gate would look like.)

[Seriphyn]

I think they're otherwise normal beneath the mask. The original Templars were said to be pale and sickly-looking, but the DUSTies we see now use different technology than the stuff from Templar One. Check out the spoiler.

[spoiler][/spoiler]

[Aria Jenneth]

I have serious doubts about the canonical nature of that shot. Wasn't that from The Infamous Issue of "Fearless"?

[Seriphyn]

Yeah, but there's also an E3 shot of an unmasked DUSTie laying around. I'm pretty sure they're normal beneath though...

[Esna Pitoojee]

There was at one point a Chronicle which described the training process for the DUST troopers, and one thing that was mentioned is that they were all inserted into a standardized, mass-cloned body tailored to be an 'optimized soldier' (notably, the body was male while one recruit was female - she insisted on joining the program regardless).

However, this chronicle seems to have vanished when I went looking for it. It's not clear to me if this represents an official retcon, or merely a brief removal from wherever it was - another chronicle, 'Morning Prayer', also briefly vanished before returning.

[Louella Dougans]

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Stranded_(Part_7)

"Each of their faces mirrors my own; the same cadaverous skin, bald head and lifeless eyes."

Unclear if that means facial features, or just appearance.

"At least our voices are unique, I think to myself."


This is the chron Esna was thinking of, I believe. It mentions "stock clones", for budgetary reasons. It seems to be Republic, as a couple of the bods are/were Valklears.

These may however, be the prototype troopers, while the Republic gets things in order, and DUST troopers proper, may keep their own faces, and have variations in appearance, with non-stock clones, once the budget is no longer an issue.

Would think the psychology of seeing identical faces all the time would cause more problems than it solves logistics wise, no?

[Davlos]

I highly doubt that DUSTies get to keep their original faces, considering how they get reanimated by an entire stockpile of stock and similar clones. It's probably a really good reason why their ingame avatars remain masked.

[Esna Pitoojee]

It is, Louella. They must have renamed it; thank you.

[Aria Jenneth]

Ah-- still need to finish reading that series. Thank you for the confirmation.


Davlos:

That was my thinking. Much nearer to true infomorph-dom, then-- one consciousness inhabiting a series of non-individualized bodies. Not that Tarquin's likely to see things the same way Aria does.

On the other hand, if you look at the screenshots, there are female DUST soldiers.

[Davlos]

Ah-- still need to finish reading that series. Thank you for the confirmation.


Davlos:

That was my thinking. Much nearer to true infomorph-dom, then-- one consciousness inhabiting a series of non-individualized bodies. Not that Tarquin's likely to see things the same way Aria does.

On the other hand, if you look at the screenshots, there are female DUST soldiers.

I think of it as a concession that was made so that the playerbase wouldn't get freaked out by the idea that their female special snowflake was going to get their consciousness transferred into a genderless genetic platform.

[Seriphyn]

Or it was just, you know, allowing female avatars like every other avatar-based game in existence 

[Katrina Oniseki]

Can someone explain to me why Capsuleers get all these ridiculously customized options for our clones, but DUST soldiers can't? We don't have hundreds of soldiers per battlefield. We have at most... what is it... 64 total? Is a War Barge not able to hold enough clones for 64 soldiers to keep 'respawning'? Holding enough clones to keep the battle going is explicitly what they are designed to do.

If not, why is a supercap able to hold enough clones to reanimate entire fleets of capsuleers on the field over and over and over again, with all their knick knacks and stuff? The only thing they can't do is hold enough ships... but they can certainly hold enough clones and capsules. Or is this where we handwave clone vat modules and say no they can't?

The logistics of Capsuleers doing it is even worse than the logistics of DUST clones doing it.

[Jev North]

Capsuleer clones are hideously expensive, customized things; where the cost is carried by a fabulously wealthy capsuleer, who will be having a very bad day if he loses more than one or two in a short period of time.

DUST clones are expected to be lost on the order of a few dozen per DUST trooper, per major battle, on a budget that's (currently) a tiny fraction of a capsuleer's wealth. They're kept as generic as possible so that any DUST trooper can incarnate in any one clone. (Of the right gender, apparently.)

So a cost-saving and logistics question after all, really. The clone budget of someone who operates an assault rifle rather than a starship simply isn't going to be nearly as high.

..huh. One bit of potential weirdness, though - do capital clone bays only hold jump clones, or can they hold your "medical" clone contract as well?

[Saikoyu]

On the gender issue, some scifi authors have though that if you are female and jump into a male body, the differences will at least make you feel off balance and sick due to brain chemistry and body cycles. 

[Katrina Oniseki]

Someone also helped me understand in OOC chat why this is. apparently, at the end of a battle, all the clones are nuked anyways. They also pointed out that DUST soldiers may very well start showing up with higher quality clones for social purposes.

Also, yes, clone vats work for jump clones too.