Wild speculation: Sung + Chimeric tech, what whould happen?

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pixelfck
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The Sung are known to be both quite advanced in their tech and less than friendly with regards the individual rights of humans.
In Corporate Command, Chimeric morphed items and ships were introduced. The stuff is clearly able to produce quite powerful results, which are pushing the boundaries of technological advancement. The Corporate Hierarchy has taken steps to destroy the Chimeric outbreak, but chances are they will miss a bit here and there.

This got me wondering: what would happen if the Sung got their hands on the Chimeric technology? Do you think it would overcome them and create Crimeric Earth Slavers? Do you think they would be able to bend it to their will and benefit from the gained knowledge?

Thoughts?

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JohnBWatson
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Chimeric technology, in the lore, appears to be designed by Oracus or some other malicious superentity. The Sung have just manufactured a fairly weak antimatter cannon that runs on expensive ammo, so I don't think they're advanced enough to tamper with the literal playthings of the gods.

I imagine that the Chimeric code would have an easy time getting into their bases, given their craving for knowledge and its tendency to masquerade as valuable software. Chimeric technology appears to base itself on the things it takes over, with Anarchists' ancient spacecraft being given slightly better laser guns and occasionally a basic blast weapon, Charon pirates going from turbolasers to ion weaponry, Corporate Ronins being given plasma missiles, and Fleet technology going from ion and particle to plasma and graviton.

The Sung field particle weaponry of slightly lesser quality than the Fleet's, so I'd imagine the Chimeric modifications would cap out at plasma, though the Dragon Slaver's Quianlong presents a wild card, given we've never seen what Chimeras can do with antimatter. The Cyberattacks are another unknown, but my guess is they would become an extremely effective transmission vector for Chimeric code.
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After Chimeric tech hijacks stuff, either Sung wipes it out much like the player does in Corporate Command or Sung gets devoured by the viral tech and George makes a new paid DLC adventure: kill the infected Sung and get a taste of the toys part II will get in Human Space. As for what the zombified Sung would do, probably what JohnBWatson posted. Sung would probably make excellent viral broadcasters.
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Song
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The problem with chimera is twofold:

1. It only attacks autofacs. So most ships are immune (larger ships that have autofacs are vulnerable though). Ships that are docked to stations with autofacs might survive if they undocked quickly but can otherwise eventually be taken over as well. (last bit is speculation). It's also a really big piece of spaghetti code (Much like some of the Transcendence source files and mods out there, only more lethally so) and has to be run on the autofacs (often manually) in order to start an infection. While it's basically impossible to stop after that, getting starting is difficult.
2. It makes exotic weapons out of regular weapons, which suffer a lot from balancing issues. They tend to be not very good ingame (in-universe is probably a different matter).



So from that.....I expect the C!Wind Slaver would be pretty much a demonic spider. Armor quality would probably be the big thing....they'd be harder to kill, even if the guns sucked. Weapons.....well, it could go to plasma, or it could go to positron damage. The Centurion gains plasma but starts off with a better weapon. Likewise the Steel slaver, although I'd expect that to end up as a missileship of some sort (even though the chimeric launcher is based off the NAMI launcher, the standard particle beam weapon just doesn't have enough power to turn into something impressive. Cyber-attacks......depends on what mods the chimera vector does. Keeping in mind that chimera tech self-assembles and is biomechanical (from what we learn in CC)......it coul go either way. It could lose them entirely, it could get a lot stronger. Certainly it could be an infection vector.

The real worry comes in with the earth slaver. The nandao bolt cannon isn't that good, but it's a good base to optimise from. And it has good (but flawed) armor by default. So it would make either a really good spawn platform, or a really good battleship. The dragon.....probably wouldn't be that brilliant. The QAC is an antimatter weapon, but it's a low powered one and very optimised already. The damage type would be something pretty insane though if chimera had time to really get to work on it so unless the fire-rate was terrible it would be doing very consistent damage. And the armor (and possibly the shield) would be fantastic.


In terms of messing with chimera stuff.......this has been talked about for an element of a registered adventure concept before (Myself, Wolfy and sometimes AP have it on the backburner for fleshing out later potentially), but that was with Luminous gear. Our idea was basically to put Luminous and Chimeric adaptive technology balancing each other out, with both trying out-adapt each other. Since Luminous has (well, had) more computing power, more resources, doesn't have biological material to co-opt into chimeric systems, and can just detonate research labs....it would just be able to learn from chimera for a while, then blow it up and start again with different feeder materials (since chimera doesn't entriely create: it adapts). Sung computing uses human brains, which would alter the ability to balance off your computing like that. It also provides a great reservoir of biomatter for use if chimera does escape containment. I don't know what the clock speed of a human brain is, but it's fairly static. If chimeric tech managed to outperform it.....then even with a lot of minds working on it, you'd likely start to lose control. And losing control of that kind of rig is a Bad Idea.

^^None of that's canon except what's in the game right now of course. It's a fun thing to guess with, since a lot of stuff about Chimera isn't known. What we do know: it infects autofacs, creates biomechanical systems (out of people potentially, if that anarchist in the first mission is anything to go by), massively improves existing tech, and was originally run by a zoanthrope made out of the Cyclops Corp. science dude, who was apparently compelled by something. And it makes really, really good armor even if the graphic is a little ugly.
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