Note: Snipped the cyberarm pic on account of space saving.
This doesn't seem to make any sense to me... capsuleers are clones in pod goo! If you lost your arm in some horrible accident, you get a new one next time you get podded!
I understood the utility of optical implants, there is clear utility when you are out of pod. What exactly does the capsuleer plan to do with a cybernetic arm? Tag along with special ops troops? Oh wait, those guys now have clone bodies too.
So this is interesting to me, although probably not interesting enough to make me actually go out and spend isk or aur or whatever they're charging for it without a real WiS environment.
The reason is that Ollie has one of these things. I don't RP it often because it's not particularly obvious.
The background is pretty simple (maybe even simplistic) and I figure because I don't use it much in RP and it has no real in-game effects anyway, I've got some latitude with anything I haven't correctly interpreted from PF.
[spoiler]
Ollie was born on an asteroid mining colony somewhere in the ass end of Gallente space. The environment toxins he was exposed to in utero (potentially in common with other genetic anomalies) left him with a dysmelic congenital abnormality, expressing itself as absence of right upper limb. That's how he was for the first 6-7 years of his life.
Stuff happened™ and then his parents aren't around anymore, so he and his sister get shipped into the dubious shelter of the Federal foster care system. They fit him out with the most cost effective and basic of artificial limbs, because high-tech stuff like gene manipulation is expensive and it's not going to work for some snivelling puke of a kid at this stage anyway. Something that'll let him do manual labour or whatever is enough.
Stuff happens™ again and he becomes a capsuleer, decades later now. No limb and cheap-but-functional artificial limbs are all he's known for the first three decades of his life - that's his normal - and they offer him added abilities, now that he's got the promise of isk coming in. Network interfacing (think of the scene in Ghost in the Shell where the guy's cybernetic hand disassembles into 'plugs' that connect with the various interfaces around him), smart-tech options (smart-gun targetting +/- links with optical implants, reflex upgrades, chemical analysis, mimicry of stored fingerprint patterns, etc), storage (weapons, toxins, data slices) and increased resilience in hostile environmental conditions (no more gloves to manipulate eyes in ultra-low temp containers a la Blade Runner) are a few of the applications that potentially come to mind.
Mostly it's about what he knows though and what he's comfortable with - what is it to not have a natural limb if it's all you've ever known and there are similar if not better replacement options out there? And what's natural about a capsuleer anyway?
So he tells the clone-techs not to worry about the gene manipulation for that 'disability' and he plugs a new SOTA arm into every new clone he cultures from his original DNA.
[/spoiler]
There's a few things it adds to my RP, but it'd be pretty easy to abuse. So it comes down to the player as always I guess.
And like I said, until they get WiS operational in any context other than walking around solo in a CQ that burns my GPU into the table under my computer, I'm unlikely to pay dollars, ISK or AUR for it (presuming that's the cost it comes at).
