Dusties / Capsuleers / Valkyrie characters will be merged to service marketing.
Mark my words.
I imagine so. What is the rationale behind why capsuleers have a normal human brain (plus implants) while DUSTies have a cybernetic brain? From my perspective it should be the other way around. What takes more brain power, running around on the surface of a planet and pulling the trigger on a gun, or flying a battleship in space with your mind?
Even today, it takes more brain power to be in the Navy than in the Army. A battleship is a big machine full of other machines floating in the water. A soldier merely has to be physically fit and remember how to follow orders.
Also, I don't see the point in it. Is it just a bunch of technological mumbo jumbo to explain why CCP hasn't managed to make the DUST world and EVE connect yet?
It's not a matter of processor power, it's a matter of transfer capabilities.
Simply, standard cloning requires the person to be inclosed in a small area where conditions can be strictly monitored in order for the burn scan to fire off safely. Hence the pod. This guarantees that there won't be issues of the burn scanner firing off too soon (or too late), because it can work under a very strict rule: Unauthorized breach of pod, fire scan.
This doesn't work on the ground because the burn scanner is too big to be lugged around and the conditions are too chaotic for it to judge accurately when to fire.
The sleeper implant, on the other hand, is capable of containing the entire conscious state on a digital medium within the body. As such, the brain itself can be converted into a monitor and control system. When the body dies, the implant likely remains 'active', because it is probably an independently-powered device. Short of a very unlucky shot striking the implant directly, the implant can operate under much more exacting conditions even on the battlefield, waiting until full body-brain death is verified before sending its transmission. In other words, it has a several-second larger window of opportunity than the burn scanner does, which is huge.
The most important reason, though, is that the sleeper technology is far newer. Capsuleers are still using technology developed a decade ago. Theoretically, there may come a time in which the sleeper implant is used in capsuleers instead of the older transneural brain scanner technology, but currently that is not the case.
Sources below.
[spoiler]The burning scanner raises the very problem of full mind-body cloning that the capsule solves. Since the scanner and its support systems are housed in a bank of equipment which requires close and stable proximity to the brain, it is in no way possible to wear the technology on one's person. Mounting the equipment in vehicles and even flight decks is problematic as wel, since the scanner needs to fire within a precise window of time, right at the subject's death. False stimuli, momentary separation from the equipment, or accidents that can take place in unsealed environments are all problems that can cause misfiring of the scanner. ...
The hydrostatic capsule provides a nearly ideal solution to the problems posed by the transneural burning scanner. in the first place, it is a sealed environment with a very clear set of tolerances and breach parameters. If the capsule breaches without the proper authorizations, the system assumes a catastrophic situation and instantly administers a nanotoxin that produces a reliable death process in the pilot. The burning scanner can therefore safely operate within the precise window required. Moreover, the scanner can and has been successfully integrated into capsule systems to take advantage of its power, data storage, and FTL communications capabilities.
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A Tale of Two Technologies,
EVE Source[/spoiler]
[spoiler]... the mercenary clone is limited by cosniderations of transmission range. It has been established that the personality-transfer technology does not use quantum entanglement. A supersoldier who is accidentally abandoned on a planet for five years is in dire circumstances, because the life span of a mercenary clone's body is apparently no longer than that. He will die and lose fire years of his life. Still, he will return, because his core personality data is held in the vast databanks of his corporation's infrastructure. He may even have been assumed killed in action and reanimated into a new clone the day after being marooned, a rather undesirable eventuality that would end up essentially creating a second copy of the individual soldier.
The important point to realize about the immortal soldiers and the capsuleers is that they are very different beings indeed. They may both be infomorphs of a kind, but those kinds are distinct. The capsuleers re-create themselves in full, or at least as close as possible, every time they clone. Every scrap of neural data, every linkage in the structure of their brains, is transferred and reproduced anew. They crave the authenticity of the experience; any fleeting breaks in their consciousnesses are generally dismissed as unimportant.
The mercenary is different entirely. His brain structure has been altered to serve the needs of the cloning technology. His entire personality and essential being is shifted out of that brain--which ahs been rearranged heavily to act as a hybrid of primal being and highly efficient control system--and into an entirely digital existence within the neuro-interface socket (NIS) at the back of the neck. The information stored in this personality stack is everything that makes him who he is as a clone trooper. Everything else has long since been abandoned.
When the mercenary is killed, his NIS has only to transmit the new data that is not stored back at the CRU and MCC banks. In effect, it is a kind of personality data difference file. A powerful burst transmissio suffices to update the core stacks. The range of this transmission is debated, but it is certainly no more than orbital, roughly speaking--a far, far cry from the theoretically unlimited range of capsuleer quantum entanglement. The radically different nature and scope of personality transmission for the capsuleer and the mercenary should at once be noted. There is no sense in which a capsuleer can seamlessly transfer to a mercenary clone, or vice versa. The very act would immediately make the receiving vessel into a different person. It would, as the technologies presently operate, be an inevitable forking of personality into two distinct beings.
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Rise of the Clone Soldiers,
EVE Source[/spoiler]