Hard Boiled
Ovum Enthusiast
This is the OOC channel for Sixteen Tons.
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Futuristic Sixteen Tons - OOC
- Thread starter Hard Boiled
- Start date
Kloudy
The Lore Savant
First!
Part of me wants to make an Apeture scientist concerned with the whole spare-cloning process. I'd have them follow the team and assess their functionality so they can send diagnostic reports back to office. With only their passion for science, any amount of debt is worth it in the pursuit of Apeture Science!
(And now back to our scheduled programming)
The other part of me wants to make a Lynx character just to rise to the challenge of making their job interesting! Perhaps a stock-checker, who catalogues what equipment the deep-rockers use and chastises them when they return them damaged or not at all. But then beneath the facade of a strangely-loyal employee we have someone digging into HarpsiCord's data and logistics, desperately searching for something...
Part of me wants to make an Apeture scientist concerned with the whole spare-cloning process. I'd have them follow the team and assess their functionality so they can send diagnostic reports back to office. With only their passion for science, any amount of debt is worth it in the pursuit of Apeture Science!
(And now back to our scheduled programming)
The other part of me wants to make a Lynx character just to rise to the challenge of making their job interesting! Perhaps a stock-checker, who catalogues what equipment the deep-rockers use and chastises them when they return them damaged or not at all. But then beneath the facade of a strangely-loyal employee we have someone digging into HarpsiCord's data and logistics, desperately searching for something...
Hard Boiled
Ovum Enthusiast
Hmm, I have a feeling we're going to be needing a character or two genuinely devoted to the HarpsiCorp vision (at least, at first). I think with the understanding that Aperture has both nearly perfected warp technology and effectively created eternal life, the desire to work for them and be a part of creating the "next best thing" would be powerful for any scientist.
I also like that you're running with the "desk jockey" thing, I agree that that would be a creative challenge, but there's a quote somewhere about how monotonous true evil can be. A man at a desk with a pen and sensitive information is very powerful in the right or wrong situations.
The first is probably more "fun", but the second would be very interesting to see played out.
Also, I guess it's a bit of a philosophical matter whether or not spares are "eternal life", but HarpsiCorp pays you to think, not philosophize.
Kloudy
The Lore Savant
I can totally see my scientist being absolutely in love with the scope of the projects they'd be dealing with. A sort of workaholic hyper-fixation personality, with a general happy-go-lucky demeanour to offset the more dark or distressing tones we'll undoubtedly be dealing with.
I'd hope they could also at some point begin being responsible for supplying our mining teams with interesting and innovative tech. I love playing the tinkerer.
Exactly, it'd be fun to explore (and be surprised by) what can and can't be done from behind a desk. Hell, I could even be live tech-support for our away teams and prove most unhelpful.
I agree. I'm leaning more towards the first idea simply because I'm uncertain how much rp content a Lynx employee will actually be able to interact with. If we could discuss goals and plots a little before I make my decision, I'd rest a little easier knowing I made the right choice.
I suppose, if you'd permit, I could run two characters. Though I don't feel like I have the time to juggle two at the moment.
Me personally, I'd argue that it is. There's several excellent philosophical thought-experiments that touch upon the potential eternal continuation of life and what that means for the identity of the individual.
The Worm Man is a great one, dude gets vertically split in half and both halves regenerate (sci-fi reasons). Now both of them claim to be the original and take the other to court for all their shared possessions. Even their shared spouse can't tell them apart. But which is the real Worm Man?
A better example would be the Teletransportation Paradox. I'll add a little flavour to it as well. A company builds and markets a teleporter to Mars. A man uses it and subsequently sues them for murder, claiming they killed him - which is strange as he is alive and suing. As the teleporter scans you to the atom, breaks you down and has another machine assemble you in the exact same way - the man argues that for an arbitrary amount of time he was in fact dead. This would suggest that identity remains linear.
But the teleporter receives an upgrade and no longer needs to destroy you to operate. Now you can send yourself to Mars an infinite number of times, but does that mean each copy is truly the real you?
I'll stop philosophising for now haha, but I'll leave you with one more. The Ship of Theseus. A thief comes to steal a famous and very valuable ship, but finds two identical ships docked. Frustrated he asks a deckhand which ship is the real one. The man tells him that the original had been damaged from use, and over time they had progressively replaced parts until the entire ship was newly renovated. The second ship was assembled from all the old parts as part of a collection.
The thief looks between the two ships bewildered and asks, "So which one should I steal?"
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Hard Boiled
Ovum Enthusiast
Absolutely! A bit more lore on attire and equipment to aid with CSes and visualizing and I'll get into the meat of it with you all.
I wouldn't necessarily be against two characters, but I wouldn't advise it either. Start with one and see how you feel, I think.
As far as how everyone will be interacting, I feel as though a good portion of it of it will be done through work, if that makes sense. Everything on the space rig is connected, from the miners in the ground to the weapons manufacturers in the labs to the offices at the top. Depending on what our characters decide, they can either work in an effort to serve themselves, serve the company, or serve the greater community of HarpsiCorp employees.
Say, a miner finds a big ol' vein of precious metal, and decides to keep it to himself and not mark it on his report. Normally, that would be caught by the people in the offices and that employee would be terminated. But perhaps not if the one in the office is getting a cut. From there, if they want to do anything with it, they need to sell it outside of the HarpsiCorp network, which means hiring a pilot, which... You see where I'm going with this? Unless they all want to sit exactly where they are and drown in debt for eternity, they can't work alone.
Everyone innately has a common goal: get out of debt, which is practically impossible through normal means. Whether they want to help other people along the way, who knows?
This was a wild ride. I cannot wait to see what you cook up for this RP.
Kloudy
The Lore Savant
Hard Boiled
Ovum Enthusiast
Concept art and more lore has been added to the lore page!
Kloudy
The Lore Savant
I... I think I just found a way to singlehandedly pay off my debt with a desk job... Bureaucracy trembles.
Unearthly
wait a sec, who am i again?
oh heck, im late!
personally i had the concept of an engineer who frequently takes dangerous risks with their work and ends up creating a lot of Spares, which would definitely be interesting with all of this ethics going on : O
personally i had the concept of an engineer who frequently takes dangerous risks with their work and ends up creating a lot of Spares, which would definitely be interesting with all of this ethics going on : O
Hard Boiled
Ovum Enthusiast
Assuming you mean a Lynx engineer, that sounds great! Plenty of work-related hazards to go around that could kill someone.
Unearthly
wait a sec, who am i again?
yeah, thats basically it! (by complete coincidence, i started getting back into Shipbreaker just a few days before this was announced, so im feeling pretty inspired lol)
Unearthly
wait a sec, who am i again?
alrighty, got my CS in!
jarjingbing
Kitsune
I'm having trouble trying to copy the CS template
Hard Boiled
Ovum Enthusiast
It looks good for the most part, but I'm going to be honest, twenty-one thousand spares is.... A lot. She would probably be terminated if she was that much of a liability.
Sure, it earns HarpsiCorp a lot of money via her debt, but that's all if she can pay it back, which is doubtful at best.
Do you think we can maybe keep her number of spares in the triple digits? 21k is just.... Wow
Unearthly
wait a sec, who am i again?
ah heck i miscalcuted! one sec
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Unearthly
wait a sec, who am i again?
alright, dialed it back
Hard Boiled
Ovum Enthusiast
Don't worry about the BBcode if you don't want to go through the trouble or if you're not familiar with it, but if you do want to, literally all you do is copy and paste this
Code:
[border=6px groove #FFAE42][bg=black]
Text
[/bg][/border]and replace "Text" with your whole post. Use the "Preview" function in the top right of your writing-box-thing to see how it looks before posting.
The above example would look like this:
Text
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Hard Boiled
Ovum Enthusiast
Great. 300-something is much much better - Still about one death every ten days, which is a lot of deaths, but not so many that you'd be terminated. She would be a valued employee for her dedication to the vision. I'm excited to see what you do with someone who has died so many times. Maybe some were quick, maybe not so much. Maybe she's died from the same thing 100 times. Super cool.
That said, I think I liked her account balance a little closer to where it was at. One spare is expensive, much more so a couple hundred, but that's not a huge deal if you don't want to edit that. 2bil isn't pocket change, after all.
Otherwise, your CS looks great to me. 11 years of service and still an apprentice is very on-brand. I'm also very happy with her psych eval/biographical information.
Kloudy
The Lore Savant
I have a question about this whole spares business: If each day there is an attempt to charge our accounts for the debt we owe, and this causes us to get killed and charged an extra spare as punishment, then surely employees would be racking up 365 spares a year minimum?
Also - do you have a preference for faceclaims? Realistic or art?
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Hard Boiled
Ovum Enthusiast
I'm not sure I understand the question. There is only one minimum spare, as HarpsiCorp finds it easier to just put you in a body with all the implants already in it rather than surgically inserting them and risking death anyway. After that, you only get a spare if you somehow die in the line of work. If you die outside of work hours, you can also get another spare for an increased charge.
When an employee is "terminated", their genetic sequence is removed from the Everwork system and all HarpsiCorp technology in their current body is deactivated. Perhaps I should've explained that in lore, but I planned to do so very early in-character. (This doesn't mean you still don't owe them money, you just can't work for them to earn it.)
Faceclaims can be whatever you want, or none at all with a description.
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Kloudy
The Lore Savant
I understand all that, let me rephrase.
"PAYMENTS ARE DUE BY 0800 HOURS EVERYDAY.
FAILURE TO PROVIDE PAYMENT WILL RESULT IN SUBSEQUENT TERMINATION.
WELCOME TO HARPSICORP. GET TO WORK."
This is from the interest check. You say termination here, but I assume you mean we get vaporised one time if we can't pay at 0800 hours.
So, assuming this is the case, all of us would get killed at 0800 hours each day for our continued debt to Harpsicord. As this doesn't count as being "in the line of work", we would get charged for the spare generated each day.
Following the math, that's 365 spares a year. For our beloved manager Frank, that would mean he has generated at least 16790 during his career based entirely on debt-spares. Oh, and that doesn't include the one you get for free.
Just wondering if this was intentional or if I've found a funny loophole already
Hard Boiled
Ovum Enthusiast
I understand all that, let me rephrase.
"PAYMENTS ARE DUE BY 0800 HOURS EVERYDAY.
FAILURE TO PROVIDE PAYMENT WILL RESULT IN SUBSEQUENT TERMINATION.
WELCOME TO HARPSICORP. GET TO WORK."
This is from the interest check. You say termination here, but I assume you mean we get vaporised one time if we can't pay at 0800 hours.
So, assuming this is the case, all of us would get killed at 0800 hours each day for our continued debt to Harpsicord. As this doesn't count as being "in the line of work", we would get charged for the spare generated each day.
Following the math, that's 365 spares a year. For our beloved manager Frank, that would mean he has generated at least 16790 during his career based entirely on debt-spares. Oh, and that doesn't include the one you get for free.
Just wondering if this was intentional or if I've found a funny loophole already
No, that is not the case. That means that if you miss a payment, you'll be fired and left with the rest of your debt to deal with otherwise. Termination does not mean they kill you. Termination in the traditional job sense.
Kloudy
The Lore Savant
But it's impossible to pay off your debt, right? So wouldn't you get terminated immediately?
Hard Boiled
Ovum Enthusiast
They don't expect you to pay off your debt in one sum. Do you pay off your mortgage all at once? You take a (large, if not entire) portion of your paycheck to pay off your debt. There is a minimum required payment every day, which will be expanded upon in-character, but you can pay off as much as you want, if you have it.
Kloudy
The Lore Savant
Ahh, now it makes sense. Alright, that's perfect thanks!
